People's failure to understand that fascism is a fairly banal worldview reflects a refusal to understand how common and ordinary looking it is and how well it hides behind our modern high tech lifestyles.
Fascism doesn't have to have 1930s pomposity and daily military parades.
It can look like America, right now, today, depending on who and where you are. America already has military jingoism, mass incarceration, mass surveillance, unchecked paramilitaries, and theocrats denying our rights.
Honestly, I don't trust anyone who doesn't find stuff like the Pledge of Allegiance or the bombastic jingoism of the Fourth of July at least a little creepy.
But a lot of people -- cis-het white people specifically -- have internalized so much of this stuff as "normal" that political discussions are derailed by having to convince them that things are already bad for other people and that it's been happening for years.
"We have to fight fascism!"
Yes, but you don't even know what fascism looks like.
It's been here for a while. It just wasn't threatening you.
This is fundamentally the problem of arguing politics with white liberals: they prefer to believe fascism is a dramatic new thing that COULD happen, not an extension of existing systems with built-in inequity at every level.
Few are so tone deaf as to vocally support, e.g., sweeping up homeless people and throwing them in jail, but many accept it, and few seem to contemplate why homelessness even exists or why our only solutions are to criminalize and imprison people.
It just doesn't register.
Nowhere Girl
Barry C