Fascism, as an ideology, is utterly fascinating to look at sometimes. It strikes so many wildly different mental chords that you can get lost trying to understand the minds of its believers and followers without even trying to, all while just drinking your morning coffee.
At what point are the right happy?
To answer this, it is utterly critical to mention that Fascism, as an ideology, is fundamentally predicated upon the idea that the Fascist “In-Group” is better than whatever “Out-Group” they are focused on at any given moment (Jewish people, LGBT+, Black people, Mexicans, etc.). To that end, they will stop at NOTHING to crush, oppress, exterminate, and ultimately obliterate that Out-Group completely, all the while screaming to their fellows and to anyone that will listen that the Out-Group is simultaneously infinitely weak and easy to crush, as well as insurmountably strong and impossible to resist. This contradiction allows them to drive themselves into a frenzy, by pissing each other off, as well as draw in new recruits who hear about the Out-Group as “weak” and decide they want to get in on it. Meanwhile, anyone who thinks deeper about this contradiction more easily writes off their movement as sloppy, reactionary, and ultimately harmless, since they clearly don’t know anything, letting them amass real public support under the radar for DECADES; we’ve seen this in America, with Fox News doing tons of heavy lifting for almost 50 years now in the Fascist PR department. It WORKS.
Once the In and Out-Groups are established, and public support starts to amass, the Fascists move to take public office, often starting in smaller, local elections that nobody runs for, elections that they can get a bunch of their buddies in the In-Group to vote for. Once they achieve public office, they try to continue ascending the public ranks to further their group’s political legitimacy, often forming alliances and coalitions with other right-wing and conservative groups to garner additional support in the legislature. For a historical example, the actual Nazis did this in Weimar Germany, starting as a fringe group in local elections, slowly climbing the ranks and gathering support, and ultimately working with other conservatives to seize power. Once sufficiently embedded in the system, they start purging members who aren’t sufficiently zealous and loyal to the In-Group, now a Political Party, and continue raging about the Out-Group, but on a state-side, or even national scale.
At this point, several things can happen. If there isn’t strong enough leadership in the party, it can splinter into a bunch of factions that hate each other, but still work together because they hate the Out-Group more. If there IS strong leadership in the Party, then they tend to make a mad grab for power, and consolidate it as much as they can. We saw this with Jan 6, Germany saw it with The Night of The Long Knives. Should this fail, the whole Party may very well self-destruct from infighting.
Now, you may ask, “what does any of this have to do with my question???” Remember, the entire time they’ve been climbing the political ladder, they’ve been raging at the Out-Group constantly, whipping themselves ever higher into a frenzy, garnering more and more support as they gather legitimacy in local elections. And now that they’ve made their mad grab for power, should it succeed, they can actually ACT on all their rhetoric that more rational, level-headed people wrote off at the beginning.
It starts with outright oppression, the boot of the state on the neck of the masses, usually focused on the Out-Group, but everyone feels it. Then it escalates, usually into mass-confinement and deportation of the Out-Group, while the oppression on everyone else gets worse. But as the rhetoric never ends, so too must the escalation; Extermination. Once the suffering and deportation of the Out-Group isn’t enough, always they turn to extermination. And once the Out-Group is gone…
Well, they’ll just find a new one. And another. And another. Over and over, until there’s only one group left, after all the purging and expulsion and deportation and death - the In-Group. But they won’t stop there. No, they keep going, denoting various internal factions as the Out-Group, targets to purge and exterminate. Constantly, accelerating as the numbers get smaller, until the whole Party explodes.
So. To answer your question, the Right will NEVER be happy, no matter how hard or how many Out-Group members they purge and exterminate. Because Fascism doesn’t have an endpoint where the In-Group “”“wins”“”. The entire ideology is fundamentally predicated on that singular idea, that the In-Group is better than the Out-Group, and the Out-Group MUST be destroyed, no matter what, and any questioning of that directive brands you a traitor to the Party and a member of the Out-Group. They’ll continue down that road, purging and screaming and oppressing and exterminating until the only thing left is a room of Party leader corpses full of bullets from each other’s guns. Or until they’re stopped. Whichever comes first.
When it’s stripped down to its bare essentials, yeah. They’re a cult founded on internalized hatred and externalized rage; if there’s no external target for that rage, it turns inward, and the whole thing self-destructs.