Rich powerful people used fascism to defend their wealth from rising labour unions and socialist tendencies in Germany and elsewhere. This should ring a bell seeing all the tech billionaires rally behind Trump to protect themselves from a Green New Deal, higher minimum wage, environmental regulations and so on

Why? Capitalism consolidated wealth into just a few companies and people. Those people want to be in charge, so they bribe politicians and help them win. The kind of politicians that will take a bribe care more about consolidating their power than representing the people. They rework the government to make it easier to stay in power. This is fascism.

It’s practically a straight line.

There are plenty of ways to mitigate this and protect against it, which the US had. These were systematically dismantled over the years and no one stopped it.