All eyes are riveted on Egypt, international showcase of the "Arab" Spring regime change operations. The enthusiasm with which the Western media have been promoting the Egyptian "revolution" is enough to raise serious doubts as to its true nature. In reality, the Empire believed that the Arabs were ripe for the establishment of the most effective social control mechanism under the sun: an alternating two-party system.The two capitalist party system is the winning formula for capitalist rule, the details of which have been so successfully worked out in the political system of the US. Nevertheless, US ties to foreign military establishments is always ready to take command should this formula fail.
Actually, now that I think about it, this latter feature is a part of capitalist strategy in the US should the two-party system fail here. Think about the Patriot Acts, the vast prison system, secret agencies such as the CIA, FBI, and NSA, and the growing power of militarized police forces coordinated nationally by the Department of Homeland Security. This feature functions as a kind of political insurance to maintain the system and the class of people who benefit from it. Few people in the US see it as fascism because it lies mostly out of view behind the curtain of fake "democracy" which consists of a comprehensive propaganda machine, managed elections, financed representatives--all under the direction of financial/corporate elites.
Also people tend not to recognize this component because of stylistic differences from the fascism that occurred in the 1930s. They don't see the mass organized demonstrations of loyalty to a leader (fuehrer), they don't see goose-stepping soldiers, and they don't see racist pogroms on anything like the same scale. And finally, people don't want to see the injustice and ugliness all around them. Too often they prefer the comforting lies of their masters.
Trotsky understood fascism far better than most people. In 1932 he wrote:
At the moment that the "normal" police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium -- the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat -- all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.
...the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, ...it means first of all for the most part that the workers' organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism....