I ask, because you see a lot of libs and liblefts calling America fascist, but then being asked how, and not being able to respond.

I think for me fascism is what happens when people with power and you know some people performing democracy are working to only improve their own position by eliminating democracy for others. Somewhere, sometimes at home but usually last. Whether because the powerful people are literally Hitler or because everything in the current arrangement incentivizes these outcomes. Plenty of people don't think about the ideology of what they're doing, but there definitely are ones who do.

I'm fucking stoned but financing the police and militaries of dictatorships friendly to large western shareholders. All those episodes where we just snuffed out of a democracy because of those same shareholders' interests. Often doing things under false or imagined pretexts engineered by oligarchs. Decisions that put millions of lives at risk, based on Team B, "mind control" accusations on par with Havana Syndrome, and WMD.

After WW2 the country was resegregated racially with CIA drugs as the pretext for FHA redlining. Just because the consensus of a few powerful families, some officially foreigners, doesn't have a guy going and people mostly comply because they're too powerless on their own and the powerful people were incentivized by market forces that doesn't make the outcomes for billions of people any less fascistic.