i used to find it so puzzling how the united states had fought genuinely valiantly against the nazis in WW2, and yet so quickly started embracing and developing on nazi/fascist methods, ideologies, personnel, etc.
what i did not realize until recently is that the reason this happened was because it was mostly circumstantial that the USA was even involved in WW2 in the capacity that it was, and there was little to no actual ideological disdain between capitalism and fascism. it is mostly down to chronological happenstance that the US opposed the landgrab fascism of the Axis more than the defensive communism of the USSR or nascent leftist groups of the '30s, and it was proven out through the "cold war" where the US government's real priorities lay.
reframing the 20th century as the tumultuous birth years of leftist populism and the various reactions to it (fascism, capitalism, et al) has really made a lot of things click into place. we're still in the first hundred years or so of what we'd call "modern leftism", and if you look at the great length of human history, a lack of ideological victory within a hundred years is hardly unheard of, and doesn't necessarily signal a certain total defeat.
