I'm glad you find my argument coherent even if you disagree with my conclusion.

The ideological rise of fascism in America dates, as I see it to Henry Ford and the rise of industrialism.

The unsuccessful coup attempt in the 1930s (names escape me but you can look it up... it involved the DuPont family among others, and a famous WWI general) was an expression of this tendency. However the rise of Roosevelt and the New Deal generally slowed fascism.

It was the rise of what Republican President Eisenhower described as the military industrial complex in the 1950s that began to mark a new resurgence of the economic structure of capitalism, in which major industries began to become the dog that wagged the tail of government. That process continued to grow, and really gripped government under Ronald Reagan and Bush.

While I spoke in black and white terms, (is/is not a fascist country) it would be more accurate to speak of the strength of the fascist tendency.

I do not think it is historically or intellectually justified to speak of fascism prior the 1920s in America. (However I'm open to arguments to the contrary, if supported by coherent historical reasoning.)

The subserviance of government to industry is a leading indicator of fascism, but it is not a sine qua non. Fascism really must include ethno centrism or religious fanaticism. There do exist examples of countries that are not ruled by their corporate or business classes and not reliant on ethnocentrism as a strategy of rule. In general many European social democracies meet this standard. Control of corporations by a democratic government is a very different thing from control of the government by privately held corporations, although I suspect that conservatives would like to obscure that difference.

We disagree about the elections in 2000, but that is a whole other argument. In my view they marked the return to power of a blatantly fascist leader and party. The democrats whom I support will roll back some of the more odious elements of fascism (religious and ethnonational extremism), but unless they are willing to roll back corporatism (corporate control of government and elections), it is hard to score them as being fully anti-fascist and true advocates of democracy.

I hope that answers some of your questions about how I understand 20th and early 21st century political reality.

Not everyone is fascist, and not everything has been fascist... but fascism is an endemic problem for which the only antidote is democracy and open societies based on equality and the democratic control over the economic institutions of a society (social democracy) so that the economic institutions do not ultimately hollow out the institutions of democracy completely.