Fair, I wouldn’t disagree with a lot of that assessment. I will say though, because of the fallout of WW2 and the obvious negative connotation with associating oneself with fascism, a party is unlikely to literally call themselves fascist. I exaggerated with the “open” part there.

But we have guys like Pete Hegseth with Nazi symbology tattooed on his body, Elon throwing Nazi salutes, the MAGA administration hollowing out the old institutions and federal departments and installing sycophants, Trump putting his name on stuff and doing random vanity works, all the nationalistic sloganeering and obsession with one man, concentration of power toward the executive, actual secret police with masks and no identification dragging people off the streets and disappearing them, silencing and deportation of journalists, and the attempted dismantling of the judiciary. In all but name, MAGA meets the qualifications of a fascist movement. More in a dysfunctional Mussolini kind of way, or in a modern context, Duterte in the Philippines. Luckily they haven’t been able to grab total power, so some parts of the republic are still pushing back, if they weren’t I suspect we would look a lot more like Mussolini’s Italy.

I feel like manifest destiny was sort of an inevitable consequence of the colonial imperialism that America was founded under in the first place. There’s a reason it happened in Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America as well, there was never any intention for these imperial conquests to just stop and let the Native Americans be. It just so happened that it was under the new US government rather than the British empire. But we were born from them and inherited a lot of their tendencies. Still though, industrial era imperialism and fascism are meaningfully different, though you can certainly argue the attitudes from manifest destiny permeated American culture and are still influencing our politics to this day.