Again, Black people are an exception here, as basically anyone who stayed in the Jim Crow South has a living memory of living under what amounted to fascism, including the “always walking on eggshells/lack of social trust/long periods of boring endurance/randomized terrifying violence”
Pretty much. What it mostly boils down to is that most Americans really don’t have the faintest idea what living under modern authoritarian regimes actually looks like, and how it’s often at the same time way more boring and way more scary than they’d imagined.
In the spirit of “yes, and”: I wouldn’t have called it fascism, but the list at the end of your post also describes the experience of some gay communities in the period where people were out but not widely accepted. There’s some living memory of that.
