there's fascist elements in modern american political discourse, but the actual tendency seems to be towards oligarchy and thus feudalism. from feudalism is capitalism born, and so it returns, now with technopriests. hell, there seems to be a desire among the peasants for a king, so maybe we'll get a monarchy out of it. democracy and the republic are rhetorical contrivances that gave us 200 years of ennobling sentiment to try and rally around, but murka was born from and with a love of feudalism, and that has slowly eroded our high-falutin' ideals.
capitalism, communism, libertarianism, fascism: all are too academic for the brood-creatures and mud-dwellers of the masses to internalize. nothing with any ideological complexity can form a legitimate tendency, despite all the clever rationales of the twitterati. so many words to paper over a nasty truth: people are, in aggregate, fucking tribal and stupid -- and the masses, even slightly freed from the cognitive terror of education, push for lords and zaddies to set and enforce comfortable norms. best you can hope for is a brief alignment between ideology and tribal pressures.
also, secret police forces are hardly the exclusive province of fascists. i mean, it's not like our own police forces didn't originate in the shadow patrols of the oligarchic, quasi-feudal south.
