Thanks Robert! You bring up a lot of interesting well thought out points. Especially interesting what you say about herrenfolk democracy, because I was discussing with my American wife during the Trump presidency, what modern-day fascism would look like in the US.

My thoughts was that all systems are products of the particular realities and traditions of the county they evolve in or get implemented in. Just like communism in Russia was heavily influenced by the Czar system, one sees how Nazism was really a collection of old ideas which had been around in Germany for a long time. People in Germany could be sold on dictatorship as the experience with democracy was short and not that great. The Nazis was appealing to a glorious past of imperial Germany.

But you cannot do that in the US. An American fascist cannot appeal to some glorious American imperial past with an emperor, because they never existed. America has always been a democracy and thus an American Nazi cannot dream of dictatorship. I think what you describe is the missing puzzle. I didn’t have a name for it but my conclusion was that Fascism in America would in many ways look like the old South.

I can imagine an extreme form means the Republican Party gets all the power and elections are really just a contention between different Republicans. Democrats may be left with the same role as the opposition in Russia and Singapore. They are just there to legitimize something which isn’t very democratic.