We like to say that they're the same, but there seems to be some kind of difference. In the USA, a liberal will usually prefer wine, foreign cars and food and media, basketball, CNN and The New York Times. A fascist will prefer beer, American cars and food and media, football, and Fox News. One votes for Democrats, the other votes for Republicans. One is obsessed with Russia, the other with China. One at least pays lip service to LGBTQ+ folks, the other wants them in concentration camps. One is happy to have people of color in positions of power, so long as they toe the capitalist line, while the other rages against this. One tends to have a college education, the other doesn't (although plenty of chuds work in tech or are engineers of some sort). One tends to work in offices, the other tends to be a business owner and/or landlord, although American labor unions are full of liberals and conservatives (it's the same for non-unionized blue collar workers). Liberal business owners tend to be in the service industry (especially restaurant owners, in my experience), while conservative business owners are more concerned with resource extraction or anything related to fossil fuels. Liberals tend to be more articulate (with notable exceptions), while conservatives can barely form sentences, even when they're just speaking.
What makes a person a liberal or conservative? I'm defining these people here as anyone who participates in federal elections in the USA, roughly half of the people trapped in the USA. They tend to have at least have some money and property. I guess a white male cis born in the countryside is likelier to become a fascist, while a similar person born and raised in cities will probably be more liberal. But there are plenty of exceptions. Epstein and most of his friends are kind of difficult to classify here. It seems that it's easier to tell these people apart when they're in the labor aristocracy / petite bourgeoisie, not in the haute bourgeoisie.
We determined awhile ago on Hexbear that most of the posters here come from liberal backgrounds, so what pushed us out of liberalism into communism? (We've also had this discussion several times, sorry for reviving it.) Dialectically, the contradiction of the individual versus society determines this, along with subjective factors. I remember noticing homeless people when I was five; I was drifting toward communism in high school because I was so unhappy with the pointlessness of my education, but in college I was much happier and veered back toward liberalism again, and stayed that way for years. As an adult I taught overseas, used universal health care many times, then made the mistake of returning to the USA, got involved in politics, and discovered that I was playing for the wrong team, because liberals (especially the richest and most powerful liberals) are so rabidly against universal health care, despite the fact that it costs them so much more money and so many more years of their lives to be this way. This basically radicalized me permanently. But even now, so many liberals are planning to vote for the blue genocide pedophile party over the red genocide pedophile party, it seems like nothing except years of re-education (+ the total destruction of the USA) will ever change their minds. The same for conservatives, of course.
Just some thoughts I've been meaning to post here for awhile, I'm posting for critique.
The core component of all fascist states that have existed has been the desire for autarky. That is, a state which is entirely self-reliant with no imports, only exports or none at all. To achieve this, they either expand their borders to get the resources they need or they cull the population at home or both.
This is capitalism in decay and colonialism turned inwards. The bourgeois can no longer extract profits from what they have, but capitalism still demands line goes up. Once there's no more labor they can exploit, no monopolies to build, and no corners to cut, the contradictions become impossible to deal with materially.
The difference is liberalism does not wish to establish an autarky. Liberalism demands class solidarity among the bourgeois at an international level. For example, you have American electronics built in Japan using raw materials from the Congo being sold in France. This requires the bourgeois in each of those countries to not become conflicted with one another. All of their violence is directed towards the proletariat while they conspire together in mutually beneficial trade.
A fascist breaks solidarity. An American fascist, using our above example, would prefer to occupy Japan to use as slave labor, destroy the Congolese population so resources could be completely strip mined and stolen, and sell the finished products exclusively in the US. The bourgeois of those nations would resist, assembling their own armies to eliminate the class traitor.
This is what we saw happen in WWII. Italy, Germany, and Japan all tried expanding their borders to enslave and steal against the interests of liberal capitalists who continued adhering to laissez-faire trade, going so far as to cooperate with communists. Other fascist projects, such as Spain and Portugal or South Korea and Chile post-WWII, tried similar tactics but were left weak from their initial power grabs so they were unable to invade anyone else. They went with the other option of internal culling of their populations, starting with leftist opposition.
This is also why liberals become fascists, scratched or not. The contradictions of capitalism become too overwhelming as the ways to generate profit go extinct. The only way to end those contradictions is socialism. Liberals would rather the system continue, so the contradictions are swept under the rug with fascism as they start trying to decide who among them should be expelled.
This focus on autarky as the essential factor is a bit idealist, no offense. But you also laid out the correct material basis for the historical (i.e., accidental) tendency toward autarky in fascist states.
Autarky is not an end in itself for fascism. It is only a means for the consolidation of power to one section of the capitalist class. It is not a question of bourgeois ideological struggle nor of solidarity.
The distinct functions of capital laid out in Capital show the necessary division of the bourgeoisie into distinct sub-classes, corresponding to the various forms of surplus-value (rent, profit, interest, ... others?). At all times there is a divergence in the particular interests of each of these sub-classes. This contradiction manifests itself in a crisis due to any number of reasons, one of which could be a general fall in the rate of profit. But absent a crisis, what you described as "class solidarity" is not class consciousness in any meaningful sense, but merely the automatic result of their mutual self-interest in appropriating a portion of the total surplus-value. There is no necessity that any sub-class of capital believes in bourgeois solidarity.
They tried to enslave people outside their borders because the Allies minus the Soviet Union and China had already been enslaving people outside their borders for centuries. The inter-imperialist rivalry part of WWII was just imperialists fighting who gets the privilege of enslaving the rest of the world.
I don't disagree with your point here but Nazis wanted to turn such parts of the world into very literal slave plantations - with forced labourers in chains and all white overseers - whereas the Allies were content with owning the means of production, having low wage labourers work on it, and even collaborating with foreign upper classes.