The point isn't to watch for a specific kind of fascism to arise. The rise of fascism is continuous, which is how societies were so smitten by it almost a century ago.
A lot of the reactions surrounding Donald Trump are curious in that it finally took a comically despicable character, who was able to spell out very clearly the advanced state of our social necrosis in his person.
This is the equivalent of shouting and making a fuss when the fire is already lit and visible - arguably when it is too late - after having sat passively and yawning away the constant dancing about with a gasoline can and lit matches the last 40 years.
It has been pointed out that this isn't anything new really.
Terrible things are happening every day that a healthy observer would find absolutely repugnant.
We see mass poverty, homelessness, deaths from shootings and suicides, mass chronic diseases, failures of health care, distant brush-fire wars, tremendous populations in prison, gangster policing, mass looting, the full exercise of white supremacy and bigotry, and well, take your pick. These things aren't registering with enough force on our collective moral meters because there aren't men with pointy black helmets running around, or clear, cartoonishly recognizable villains. The point is that yes, things are bad, and poised to get worse.
Part of this could be related to the fact that this steady disintegration through cruel accounting is difficult to perceive for the average person; we are all bound by this money calculus and thus have some skin in the game, and are all committed to getting ahead at the expense of the other. We are bound in a continuum. And it is all very complex and widely spread out; it is difficult to perceive all at once.
But then angry monsters with pointy hats have a polarizing effect. The accumulated contradictions and the resulting catastrophe have become embodied. You can ignore a homeless man piled on the floor, staring off into space, but you cannot ignore an angry man with a knife in your face. And the police and surveillance state slowly and quietly spreads out its spindly legs in anticipation.
