this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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I assumed this is how you would view things. Liberalism does decay into fascism, but fascism is not liberal. Capitalists prefer neoliberalism to fascism because fascism is bad for business. Fascists leaders have their own goals which often clash with what's economically efficient and maximizes the power of owners.
Capitalists want there to be no regulations and few taxes, but that inevitably causes societal instability and the rise of populist movements. They support fascism to distract from socialism as a solution for exploited workers, but if those fascists gain power, they have coercive control that the capitalists in liberal democracies can't beat.
The whole point of capitalism is to have the state protect your property for you (as an owner), but the state needs to be powerful to actually keep it safe in the modern era. Liberalism tries to keep the state as small as possible, but fascists aren't incentivized to do that. They'll take your property far more easily. If you go against them, they control the cops. In a large federation like the US, you can't even buy off the local government to oppose the fed. Even if you could divide the military regionally, you couldn't win because modern war is too devastating.
For decades, capitalists have tried to empower themselves, but their greed fuels the destruction of the very system they exist in. Fascist governments sideline them unless they themselves lead it. However, they also create new opportunities for war by empowering nationalism. The rise in nationalism threatens regional war which threatens the leaders of those regions.
Essentially, capitalists support fascists who cause instability which hurts capitalists. Capitalists are stupid, thinking they can squeeze people and countries indefinitely, but they forget the number 1 rule of economics. There's no such thing as a free lunch. They try to suppress direct worker revolutions, but instead get war, governments that don't listen to them, and create a more dangerous world.
Liberalism is not capitalism, it is the favored government of capitalists and is fundamentally unstable because people are too dangerous to exploit indefinitely.