Robert O. Paxton’s book, The Anatomy of Fascism, originally published in 2004, is on my list of books to read. Unfortunately, this is not history but a credible description of what’s happening in the US.

I recently watched a 3-minute 25-second video analysis entitled The Empire Strikes Back by Charles McBryde in which he argues that the US is entering the fifth and final stage of fascism. Below is a transcript in which McBryde discusses each stage in the US context. He also offers some sage advice about what US Americans should do to ensure that the final stage ends in entropy, defined as a “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.”

1. Intellectual Exploration/Mobilization: Fascist movements emerge from disillusioned groups (often veterans) exploring radical nationalist ideas, focusing on national rebirth and rejecting liberal democracy and socialism, but without a fixed program.
2. Rooting: The movement gains traction through political deadlock, polarization, and violence, becoming a significant player in national politics, attracting followers, and making tactical alliances, as seen with conservative forces.
3. Arrival in Power: Traditional elites, fearing leftist threats, invite fascists to join or lead the government, hoping to control them, leading to fascists sharing power (e.g., Mussolini, Hitler).
4. Exercise of Power: The fascist movement consolidates control, balancing or dominating existing state institutions (police, army, clergy) while suppressing opposition and radicalizing society.
5. Radicalization or Entropy: The regime either becomes increasingly extreme and revolutionary (like Nazi Germany’s total war) or devolves into a more conventional, often decaying, authoritarian state (like Italy’s later period). 

Paxton emphasizes that only Germany and Italy truly progressed through all five, and this framework helps understand fascism’s dynamic, situational nature rather than a static doctrine. (Source: AI Overview)

Video Transcript (my italics)

American fascism is in an extremely delicate moment right now as we are entering the fifth and final stage of fascism. Let me explain. In his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, the premier historian of fascism, Robert Paxton, identifies five distinct stages of fascism.

The first stage is intellectual exploration, when fascist leaders start to break with the conservative establishment. For us, this would be like the Tea Party era. The next stage is movement building.

This is when the movement finds its voice, finds the grievances that it’s going to want to focus on, and most importantly, it finds the leaders. For years, the Tea Party was a movement without a leader. And finally, that leader arrived on the scene in the form of Donald Trump.

I met Donald Trump twice in 2015 and I couldn’t help but think that this man is going to be the next president of the United States.

The third stage of fascism is arrival to power. This one’s confusing for us because Trump arrives to power twice. The first time, it’s unexpected, it’s incomplete, and he kind of fumbles it. At every turn, his agenda is blocked not only by his own incompetence and the incompetence of the people he surrounds himself with, but also the longtime bureaucrats who are uninterested in seeing the fascist hollowing out of the US government.

It is only in his second arrival power that we really see the fourth stage of fascism, which is the consolidation of fascist power. This is when you start to see the union of state and corporate power really starting to merge. The fascist movement now has a program, it has a vision, and most importantly, it has the levers of state and it can turn them against its enemies. This is what we’ve seen over the past year as tech billionaires, longtime conservatives, and even many liberal establishment figures have bent the knee to Donald Trump and his agenda.

But now with the midterms approaching, his favorability level’s low, the recent actions in Venezuela, and now the controversy surrounding ICE, we have entered the fifth and final stage of fascism. And this is the most precarious stage. Robert Paxton divides this stage into two separate paths, radicalization and entropy.

Depending on which of these the Trump administration pursues, you could either have a very dark future or we could watch the entire edifice of this movement collapse. The premise is this, fascist movements have to radicalize in order to survive. That’s how they built their power in the first place, finding shared grievances, finding shared enemies.

Then when things go badly for fascist movements, they have to shift the blame elsewhere. They have to find new enemies, they have to fire, they have to purge. All of this has been happening over the past year and a half and Trump is now testing the limits of what the American people are going to put up with.

If we stop putting up with it, then his entire project collapses into entropy. The whole thing starts to unravel from the top. People turn on Trump, Trump starts distrusting his people, and pretty soon they realize that the only way to get out of this is to de-escalate tension with the American people.

Paradoxically, the only way that we, the American people, can meet this moment is by escalating. We need to make it socially, politically, economically impossible for the Trump administration to have any peace, for ICE to have any peace. Our decision to escalate with this administration forces it to de-escalate with us because the more it escalates, the more radicalized it will become, the harsher will its crackdowns be, and the more unpopular it will become.

This is bad news for Trump because he’s already a deeply unpopular president with an unpopular program. He hasn’t consolidated power enough to be entering this stage. His fascist takeover is still incomplete.

It has a long way to go. He’s showing his hand too early and it’s time for us to call his bluff.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.)

Dear Leader is “showing his hand too early” because he’s experiencing cognitive decline coupled with the fact that he’s a textbook malignant narcissist. He’s no Hitler or even Mussolini. Having said that, he has some hardcore and determined fascist wingmen and -women supporting him, including Stephen “Goebbels aka Pee-wee German” Miller.

In a nutshell, 2026 is shaping up to become a watershed year in US and world history. Stay tuned.

Peace, MAA