Ask Lemmygrad

I will preface this by saying I am a novice and only started reading theory a few weeks ago and could be way off, but this is my current understanding.

I read Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds, and two quotes stood out to me:

What distinguishes fascism from ordinary right-wing patriarchal autocracies is the way it attempts to cultivate a revolutionary aura. Fascism offers a beguiling mix of revolutionary-sounding mass appeals and reactionary class politics. The Nazi party's full name was the National Socialist German Workers Party, a left-sounding name. As already noted, the SA storm troopers had a militant share-the-wealth strain in their ranks that was suppressed by Hitler after he took state power.

Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a "New Order" while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confusion but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled.

As I am British, I have been applying these ideas to the UK. It aligned perfectly with Reform.

'cause the thing is, fascists, more often than not, do actually see and talk about real problems, but then they misplace the blame to further their own interests. See the short snippets from this BBC Question Time where the Green party leader Polanski replies to Zia Yusuf, a higher up of the fascist Reform party: https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2025/10/10/zack-polanski-bbcqt/

The capitalist Tory government spent the last decade and a half gutting public services in the name of private profits, but instead of blaming current problems on that, Reform blame immigrants because they have no interest in fixing the problem, they just want to be the one to profit from it.

TLDR: The same factors that drove you to communism drives fascists too, the difference is communists want solutions but fascists want to profit from the problems.