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Originally Posted by Huntingwhale
Nazi Germany wasn't the Nazis we know in a day. Stalin wasn't the murderous person he was in a day. No authoritarian regime is their final form on the 1st day.
I get what you're saying as we're not there yet. Key word is YET. But to ignore those signs and say it's not fascism because we haven't crossed the dictionary definition yet is foolish. Plenty acts of fascism have been put in place since 2016 in the US. Don't pretend it's not pushing for a full-time job.
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I think this point gets missed a lot. When learning about history, a casual observer focuses on the end result and views events as inevitable, without focusing on the fluidity. Part if it is way we teach it, by dividing history into blocks of time, as if each block is isolated from the one before it. These get extended the further in time we get. You can draw straight lines from events that occurred hundreds of years ago to the current geopolitical climate we are in now, but too often we mentally make segments, which is detrimental to understanding how things happened.
We teach Medieval European history as a 1,000 year block, but then divide up WW1, WW2 Middle East turmoil, the Balkan Wars, etc... into short segments, as if each wasn't part of a feedback loop caused by the previous. From there you can keep going back as WW1 was fed by democratic revolution, which was fed colonialism, which was fed by the industrial revolution, and so on. You can literally keep going back until the dawn of civilization down many different tangents.
That's why drawing comparisons to the minutia is a worthwhile exorcise. It's about recognizing important crossroads and indicators, not about direct comparisons.