My take is that there is a link to the fact that energy is getting harder to access

The economy is directly related to energy, economic growth is linked to energy consumption growth. As long as we had plenty of fossil fuel easily available to economy was booming, the "American dream" period was also the period when the US was had a lot of oil field easily exploitable.

Thanks to this fossil fuel energy life was getting better every year for everyone. Everyone was getting a "bigger slice of cake" every year. In this context we've seen a lot of social progress.

Now energy is less accessible and most of the economic growth is going toward the 1% - 0.1% richest. So the "slice of cake" is now stagnating or even shrinking for most of the population. In this context fascism is tempting.