baltakatei

For an academic text on this subject with footnotes, I recommend Chokepoint Capitalism (2022) by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. It calls what you describe “moat buulding” and an “anti-competitive flywheel”.

The US didn’t even get the excuse of being forced to pay obscenely high war reparations to justify their fascism. Instead, it’s dissatisfaction with inflation which, in turn, is the predictable combination of the exponential depletion of scarce resources (real estate, water) and the consolidation of property into the hands of an ultra wealthy minority. If one must frame the emergence of fascism in a “war” context, then the cause is plutocrat beligerantes strategically fighting a social class war while most of everyone else think it’s a culture war.