Not so much thread drift as thread hi-jacking, I'd call that.

Perhaps a useful angle would be to identify what characteristics in a society can get in the way of going down the fascist road, and limit how far down that road it gets, and vice versa.
I'm not happy about using the term in an over wide sense. It tends to divert discussion into historical nitpicking. It seems to me that every society has within it the capacity to throw up from time to time an authoritarian populist nationalist regime, and they have certain features in common, though they differ very widely in the amount of harm they actually achieve. Using the term fascist makes it harder to bring in some cases where the term is not helpful, but which do have some of those features.

So, for example, what was it about Nazi Germany that resulted in a regime that so grotesquely outstripped all the other "fascisms", however nightmareish?