A really interesting thought piece Umair. This is definitely a conversation that needs to be had. While support for democracy is still relatively high among most western nations, challenges to those values - especially in the US - can be evolve very quickly.

What might help in framing this, however, is understanding the main concepts of your piece - liberal democracy and fascism - as poles of attraction, not binary ideas. It is possible for a single person at one time to feel drawn towards both the freedoms afforded by liberal democracies and also the feelings of perceived strength, vigour, and defensiveness of fascism. A form of this idea is discussed by Timothy Brown in his work, explaining why Weimar Germans could be drawn to both communism and Nazism simultaneously.

I think this is a helpful framing as it shows - like you mention in this passage - that someone can both appear and even feel happy, while having a certain attraction to more radical ideas. This manifests in their behaviour then when certain anxieties appear: e.g., alienation, loss of identity, fear over progressive change. Someone can be happy and proud of their life and community, but once threats - real or imagined - begin to appear, that happiness can quickly flash into anger. All it takes then is for a figure to mobilize that anger and you see the exact trends you are discussing.