"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

-LBJ

And it doesn't matter if you're talking about different races, different sexualities, attached vs detached earlobes, whatever. Point to a group and tell everyone "They're the problem" and you're going to have an automatic following.

Pretty much, yeah.

Fascism, at its core, is Us versus Them. Under all the complexities and layers is one simple idea: Our problems are because They have Our resources, and we need a strong leader to go to war (figuratively or literally) against Them and take Our stuff.

And I think this is incredibly seductive because it triggers our old hominid instincts, from back when we lived in small tribes on the African savannah, and when our territory was hit by drought, or fire, or natural disaster, and we didn't have enough resources, the solution really was to go into another tribe's territory, drive them out, and take their stuff.

Lebensraum is as old as stone knives and bearskins.

And the more desperate people are, the more frightened and hungry and angry they are, the stronger those old animal instincts become.

But, you know, a good leader can simplify complicated issues. A good leader can identify problems, articulate actual solutions, and direct people's angry monkey brains towards fighting for those solutions instead of persecuting scapegoats. Not Us versus Them, but All of Us, together, fighting poverty and climate change and economic hardship and building a better future.

Unfortunately, in the United States and the "free world" as a whole, we have a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people who benefit from all the economic and social failures that are causing the problems we suffer from. And they want people to believe in a simple violent solution that blames the wrong people and doesn't actually fix anything, because they don't want the problems fixed.

And you don't get elected unless these extraordinarily wealthy people give you enough money to win an election.

So we don't get any good leaders. We get a choice between fascism and the status quo, which is also fascism.

Yay, democracy.

Oh yeah, we left the EU and that fixed all our problems. Wait no that didn't work it actually made things worse, ok but trust me lets blame all the immigrants now.

I mean, the solution is easy: remove billionaires or dismantle capitalism.