Think of the 2 nations that define fascism in the modern mind: Germany and Italy. What were they before they were fascist? They were liberal.

I know this is difficult, because it requires unlearning a whole bunch of stuff and learning what feels like old history, but stick with me.

America is a Liberal country. The conservatives and the liberals in America are two factions of Liberalism. Every "tri-color" flag in Europe is the result of a Liberal revolution. Liberalism is really the first formal political philosophy that became a state system. Prior to Liberalism there were monarchies, but not because of a formal political philosophy. Monarchies emerged without that level of self-consciousness. But after Liberalism emerged, Conservatism emerged as a political philosophy to defend the monarchic state system.

Liberalism was a political philosophy developed by the merchant class in European monarchies. Before ocean-faring colonialism, merchants made money via overland trade routes and benefited from the European Crusades. But they couldn't convert their riches into real political power due to the way monarchies worked and in particular the absence of private property.

But when Europe developed the ability to do over-water colonialism, the merchant class got huge and much much richer. And that created pressure against the monarchic system. Merchants wanted to be able to buy and sell land, they wanted to buy and sell entire cities. They wanted their wealth to translate to political power.

And they couched that desire in terms of "freedom", "liberty", and "the pursuit of happiness". The crown should not stop a man (and only men, and only European men) from going off in boats to take the wealth of other societies and get rich from it. They certainly shouldn't stop bankers from funding such adventures and then claiming the right to buy millions of acres and pay workers a subsistence wage to farm it for the banker's profit.

This was the birth of Liberalism. And wherever Liberalism overthrow the monarchy, they destroyed the existing social contract (nobilesse oblige) and replaced it with "every man can earn a wage in a free society". Which resulted in about 100 - 150 years of abject poverty, famine, pestilence, slums, wars, and eventually labor movements.

Labor movements emerged as workers realized that a) the politicians and businessmen were all lying about liberty for all and b) they had to band together because the "democracies" were sending in the military and paramilitary forces to crush them whenever they decided to stop working and demand better conditions.

This went on for a while until one group of workers got organized in a different way and overthrew their government entirely. 1917, the Bolsheviks, the October Revolution. And what happened? The Liberals got super scared. They saw that it meant they could lose the battle with their own working class. So the first thing they did was invade Russia and try to stop the revolution.

But the second thing they did was fund the rise of the Third Reich and the Italian fascist movement. These movements protected markets, protected large private property holders, and promised to solve the problems Liberals were facing by 1) fusing the labor movement with a nationalist movement to prevent revolution, 2) fuse the state and labor with industrial investments to build the most productive state in the world and 3) use that fusion to field the most powerful military in the world and direct it at the Soviet workers state, destroy the revolution, and build an American-style occupation of the Slavic people's that would subjugate them for a hundred years or more, just like the Europeans did everywhere else around the world.

And the Americans, and the English, all Liberals, all businessmen with private property and individual rights to the pursuit of happiness through profits, they all funded the fascists because they saw it as a solution to the problem of labor organizing. They believed so much that the Nazis would win that they watched the Great Depression create mass unrest and when FDR's faction decided to concede some social democratic reforms to avoid revolution, the liberal businessmen of America plotted to coup him and replace him with a military man and implement European-style fascism in the USA because it was a defense against the working class.

Liberalism produces fascism. That's where it comes from. That's its systemic function. That's its history.