Anyway. Actual subject. Traitorfish initially stated that "business-owners outside of the state-complex [...] tend to constitute the leadership and social base of fascist movements". I disagreed with this, on the grounds that this does not really apply all that well to fascist movements, although it serves reasonably well to describe the far right in general. This is part of a semi-ongoing bit of repartee between me and him, based on his usually fairly exacting definitions of political stuff. I had in mind specific examples, like Hugo Stinnes and Alfred Hugenberg, neither of whom was particularly supportive of the Nazis - much less "fascist", which is a somewhat different beast - which became even more relevant when you brought up the Nazis.
In Italy especially, but also in Spain, fascism's initial backing did not come from the ranks of big business. Italy's fascists were initially from the Arditi, ex-soldiers that became paramilitaries in the quasirevolutionary ferment that the Italian state found itself in at the end of the First World War, and later gained a great deal of support from gang bosses and men who used fascism to become the equivalent of gang bosses (the archetypal ras). Businessmen, landowners, and industrialists attempted to back virtually every other possible rightist and centrist premier (so long as he wasn't one of the papist Popolari, anyway) before finally siding with Mussolini, hardly a ringing vote of confidence. Spain's fascists were not particularly numerous, but formed a hard core of dedicated students, intellectuals, and some soldiers; only after the Falange metamorphosed into a big-tent organization with the onset of the Civil War did its ranks swell to encompass Spain's few industrialists and businessmen.
You described fascism as an ideology that relies on corporatism and nationalism, both of which are true enough, albeit incomplete, and warmongering and beating up the rest of the world, which is not true. (Corporatism is not organic to fascism, but it goes along with fascist belief often enough that it might as well be.) You then claimed that the Nazis - again, not the best example of fascists - would have approved of American exceptionalism, something that seems to me to be completely off topic even if it were right, and it's not, as you admitted above. What does American exceptionalism - a phenomenon hardly confined to the One Percent - have to do with businessmen and fascism?
The reason that the NSDAP was not a particularly good example of a fascist organization is because the nationalism it espoused does not match up very well with archetypal fascist conceptions of the nation. Fascism is, at its core, an anti-individualist ideology; there is no individual, only the nation, and the state as its embodiment. Nazism didn't really work like that; the state and the Volk were separate entities, and the Führer mediated between them. The NSDAP, for what it's worth, also abandoned corporatism fairly early; even halfhearted measures like KdF were terminated by the onset of war, and KdF was hardly a corporatist policy in a meaningful sense.
In an abstract sense, it's pretty easy to see why businessmen and industrialists wouldn't be all that interested in an ideology that relies on anti-individualism and the restriction of individual rights.
