Political Memes

As tempting as it is to shit on Americans and/or Republicans, no. This started with Nixon's Southern Strategy and Obama did massively piss Republicans off so racism is a big part of all this, but while modern Republicans have it much better than 1920s-1930s Germans your portrayal ignores a very real and very significant decline in economic conditions for the average American over the past 40 years. Deindustrialization, loss of purchasing power, plain capitalist greed, housing crises all over and complicit neoliberal administrations on both sides of the aisle (anyone who thinks this is exclusively the Republicans' fault needs to go read a history book) led to a situation in which people were hurting and nobody was providing solutions, even before you get into the decline of rural America specifically. I mean hell, even just firty years ago single-income households were actually a common thing before being destroyed by the two oil crises. It's this underlying economic environment that makes it appealing to find a boogeyman to pin all your problems on and persecute, and what does this lead to? You guessed it, fascism. It's no coincidence that successful progressive politicians* tend to get at least some support from Republican voters; people are looking for solutions, not specifically for fascism.

*Most recently Obama and Bernie.