[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Its sad thing but in every society there appears to be a significant portion of people who support the tenants of fascism. The whole 'that minority group over there is wrecking things for you, we will punish them' vibe seems to really strike a chord time and time again.

[derbOac]

There's a peer-reviewed study of this that appeared in the last couple of years that showed the percent support for authoritarian rule tends to hover around 20% worldwide regardless of country, plus or minus some fuzz amount. I can't find it now because I keep finding other papers but this is another report that's is pretty consistent with it:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...

Once you get that group control is when you have problems.

This is kind of an interesting deeper dive into why people support fascism. Maybe not surprising but highlights the two main reasons: something like "we need a strong leader to take control of the government away from corrupt elite and put it back into the hands of the people" and "the government needs to be in the hands of the real, true, competent people, and not the other, fake, lesser people".

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/artic...

Personally I'm past the point of "what does fascism look like" and want to have a realistic discussion about "how do you reestablish a democracy when you're in a fascist regime?" So far the historical examples at my fingertips are all basically some variant of "people get tired of it, the cult leader passes away and everyone kind of magically agrees that fascism isn't working".

[helixfelix]

There is research that suggests that our brain composition determines our political ideology. More or less gray matter in different parts of brain determine where we land on spectrum of progressive, liberal, conservative, authoritarian.

https://www.psypost.org/authoritarian-attitudes-linked-to-al...

https://youtu.be/t-hwrIkTNFo?si=V3TKg-3dqc1htQBU

[klamann]

don't forget about the historical examples of having your home destroyed by war (usually a war started by your leader) and the regime being forcefully replaced by a foreign power. Japan, Italy and Germany are democracies today.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> Japan, Italy and Germany are democracies today

For now. But democracies are always only one election away from a party taking power and passing laws that entrench them indefinitely.

[wolvesechoes]

> The whole 'that minority group over there is wrecking things for you, we will punish them' vibe seems to really strike a chord time and time again.

But that's not yet a fascism.