There is plenty of historical precedent. Look at the Nazis and their racial/nationalistic/historical theories. None of this is new, its just all dressed up in modern buzzwords and psychobabble.

And they also share a slick, well-financed and expertly crafted propaganda machine designed to appeal to existing fear, hate, ignorance, greed and bigotry. This is classic Fascism at work, and trying to explain it away in sociological, historical, psychological or cultural ways is pointless. These guys are using a tried-and-true playbook. The point is to destabilize a society by destroying confidence in democratic institutions so they can replace it with emotion rooted deep in the limbic system. It's lizard brain logic.

It's the way oligarchs enlist the middle classes to collaborate with them to overthrow democracy. If it looks like European Fascism of a century ago it's because IT WAS MODELED on Fascist Europe of the 1920s. It may not be identical to the Fascism of Mussolini, Hitler or Franco because the geography, culture and history have changed, but the ideology is the same. It is designed that way because it has worked before. Of course, as Hitler, and later, Trump, demonstrated, sometimes the Frankenstein monster created by the oligarchs seizes control of the movement...

And its not just here, we can see the same process at work in Russia, China, Belarus, Poland, Hungary and a dozen other places. The world is turning Fascist because that is what the middle classes do when they feel the political and economic gains of their recent past start to unravel. They are looking for scapegoats and easy answers and there are always those (with their own agenda, of course), ready to provide them.