@georgeob1,
I agree that totalitarian states, once established, have strong similarities whatever the official ideology they dress themselves in, but that's almost trivial in a way.
If you look at fascism and communism as historical social movements, before their rise to power in the short sequence of 1917, 1921 and 1933 (in Russia, Italy and Germany respectively), if you focus on their
genesis in the years before, you can clearly see that Mussolini's fascism is a counter-proposal to Italian socialism of the early 20th century, a strategy to steal the thunder of socialism among the Italian masses and replace it with raw nationalism. And Mussolini had learnt mass politics in the socialist party, as an agitator and editor. You also see that Hitler got his ideas of what a mass popular movement united behind one ideology could do, by watching communist demonstrations and strikes in Vienna... He copy-pasted the communist agit-prop rule book at the service of an explicitly anti-communist cause. German communists and socialists were the first guests in the first concentration camps circa 34. Hitler was financed by German industrialists in order to break the communist party. Same pattern in Italy, though less violent.
So fascism is historically both an ennemy of communism, and its right-wing copycat in terms of mass movement techniques. This is explicit in many writings of the time, e.g. in Technique of the Coup d'Etat by Malaparte.
The idea I was talking about is that the fall of communism was in a perverse way bad news for liberal democracy. It is based on the idea that a monopoly of power, even at a global level -- such as the US becoming the sole superpower in 1989/90 -- is always risky in the sense that it encourages overreach and ubris on the side of the dominant power. And in effect, the 90's were the golden years of deregulation and the very moment when inequalities start to rise in the US. As if the boogyman of the revolution being tamed, capitalism could now truly endulge and inequality of power distribution in society could increase and increase, now unfettered by any worry about the fate of the unwashed masses.
