At some point the music stops and a lot of people will be left without a chair. That's when austerity becomes a rally cry.

But that rationale falls flat in the US context, as many analyses show that the median income of MAGA supporters is quite high. Right-wing extremism in the US isn't really about revolting peasants, it's about an alliance among multiple groups up and down the security-precarity spectrum, with very strong support from the top 5% and even more support from the top 0.1%.

Just because precarity can be a causal factor doesn't mean it's the only factor or even the dominant factor in the US.

And I wouldn't be surprised to see the US regime move into full money-printer stimulus mode to finance its wars of choice and give its base a little financially security before this year's midterm elections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_Canada

Essentially all the "warning conditions" that come out of austerity are also require a serious lack of safety net. Lack of savings, difficulty of childcare and healthcare, etc.

There were scary scary things abrew, a rapid falling sentiment, festering under the all-too-common Fear Uncertainty and Doubt antagonist politics that is the hallmark of the the conservatism to fascism pipeline.

I'm definitely applying some recency bias here, am not super atuned to the historical zeitgeist of the Canadian people. But there has been, over the years, a lot of strongmen esque not good things. And it seems like last year's election really avoided a very perilous further drop to madness by seeing what all a couple months of madness across the border looked like. Page with some polling numbers, brief in rundown, thar is at least directionally correct: https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/34363/polling-average-can...

But it would be nice to have some retellings of Canada's austerity & how that affected the people over the past two three decades! For sure!

Did we have the segregation well into the 50's? Did we bomb entire city blocks? Do we regularly have police swarm, main, and kill protesters?

There's also a direct line to the fascism we see today emanating from proto-fascist project the GOP was engaged in standing up during the early 2000s.

That GW was not the fascist leader everyone wanted him to be doesn't really push back against the idea that this group of people has largely fascist leanings. Trump gave them the final missing ingredient which was the cult leader. But every other feature you listed as missing I find were actually present, and we can debate that if you want.

But we can see how the Bush admin and voters are reacting to abject fascism. They applaud it, support it, amplify it, excuse it, or they stay silent and never push back (like Bush himself). A lot of them are the same people from back then. So really, to me the absurd proposition here is that the people who stood up the CIA torture black sites, warrantless wiretaps, homeland security, ICE, etc. who are now turning these things against all Americans, weren't at least latent fascists or fascist-leaning in their ideology.