I think it's stupid to say they have always been fascist, but people definitely don't grasp what fascism is, they think it's people marching in nice grey uniforms on the street and concentration camps out in the open and if you try to call anything that's not that they call you stupid and overreacting
Tell me that you don't know what fascism is without telling me you don't know what real fascism.
What the USA has been for a long time is an oligarchy, and there are literal Princeton studies to support it. It's only now that it's following Russia into becoming full-fledged dictatorships.
To be honest, it's not even the "they came for you" bit, they are just coming for themselves now. I mean, if the orange idiot succeeds in dismantling NATO and imposing sanctions on US trade, China will def be the new leading superpower.
NATO is what props the dollar up. They are trying to undo the change in foreign relations the US made in WWII, and they will def get back to the pre-WWII US as a result.
We could start by agreeing on the definition of the term. Because 30s fascism is no more, and that is a fact. What constitutes fascism in todays world?
As an Argentinian, the USA meddled with my country via dictatorship whthin operation Condor. That amounts to fascism, or at least, a subtype of it.
I think Frank Zappa warned us about this...
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
As per the wikipedia definition, it does seem the USA has been fascist towards the rest of the world, just not towards its own citizens (overtly) until now...
So if we agree fascism can apply internationally but not domestically (which is not usually how the term is described) then the meme is accurate
So, we have an imperialism which has both historically been in place around the globe and constantly been effecting an in-group, which exists internal to borders, and an out-group, outside them. We also have a couple different in and out groups within the US. Black people, Native americans, you name a racial minority, we've done fucked up shit to them. So, pretty textbook so far. Violent military expansionism, imperialism, and high levels of domestic racism is what most people would probably tally up fascism to be as, colloquially. They might not even pick up on a dictator being a central component. We also have corporate capture, which is pretty solidly the case in america. We have an erosion of public utilities and infrastucture. We have a police state. Fervent nationalism, controlled mass media, blatant theocratic intervention, you know, we have all the classic markers of pretty much all the definitions.
The only qualification I can cook up is that we're presumably a "democracy", right, which I didn't really even think of as being a requirement. You can have a fascist democracy, it's just a democracy where not everyone can vote, which has always been a kind of tenuous characteristic of democracy at best. We went from wealthy, white male land owners being the ones to vote, to rapidly most everyone being able to vote, actually fairly recently, in the grand history of the US. Especially horrible once you factor in gerrymandering, segregation, white flight, and redlining, which means that the average black voter had much less say (and still does have much less say) than your average white voter. We also elect people, who elect people, with more or less vote weight on both a local basis through gerrymandering and more or less weight on a per state basis through the electoral college, in a fptp system, where a kind of nash equilibrium ensures that there's only gonna ever be two viable parties or candidates in local, state, or federal elections, for pretty much the majority of america.
So, we're a "democracy", but I would say that we're only a democracy insofar as a 5 month old fetus could be considered a human. We might consider athens to have been a "democracy", too, right, according to the formal definition, but if only white male landowners can vote, then that's already such a subset of the population that you might legitimately be closer to an oligarchy at that point. And both an oligarchy and a democracy can be plenty fascist. Hell, the germans arrived at their fascism through mostly totally legitimate democratic processes.
So, I mean, yeah, america's pretty much always been a fascist country, sorry to break it to ya.