[pavlov]

That seems to be basically it.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Soviet-affiliated communist parties were triumphant in large parts of Europe. In countries like Hungary and Czhechoslovakia, they came to power through elections and rapidly seized absolute government control. Many communists in Western European countries were expecting France, West Germany and others to soon follow suit. After all, the "scientific" theory of Marxism-Leninism explained this would happen, and enough cherry-picked facts were available to support the inevitability of the capitalist governments' collapse.

Today's right-wingers look a lot like those 1948 communists. Plenty of things are going their way, but that is not good enough in itself -- the Bannon-style ideological framework makes fatalist predictions that must be validated, by adapting facts if necessary.