In the 20th century fascism was essentially a compromise between capitalism & communism. The capitalists, fearing a communist revolution, or even just liberal reform, move in the direction of a right-wing police state -- we are living this situation right now, in a period dominated by US-Anglo militarism internationally, & the growth of the right, the police, the prisons, & the collusion of the capitalist media with the right in domestic politics. New York City under Giulliani, with his brutal racist police, and Texas, with its booming, brutal prison industry, are at the forefront of the descent into fascism -- with little similarity to the Augustine Age. Fear causes the capitalists to grant more & more power to the military/police state, in order that the military may prevent liberals or communists from taking some or all of "their" property, and using it to benefit the working class.
Mussolini himself began as a leftist journalist, but allowed himself to be seduced by the capitalists. He was something of a philosopher. He glorified the Roman empire and decided that he could benefit the workers and peasants of Italy by becoming Il Duce, a fascist dictator modeled after the Roman emperors, who would divide up the large agricultural estates among the peasants (instead of instituting Leninist collective farms), and run a planned national economy, where the capitalists would maintain ownership of industries, but the dictates of Il Duce would replace the operation of the "free" market (instead of seizing the industries as a communist government would). Faced with a working class inspired by Lenin's propaganda pouring out of Moscow, the Italian capitalists were happy to make the compromise. Il Duce's imperial ambitions were expressed by the annexation of Ethiopia.
Hitler was inspired by Mussolini, and also by a racist misinterpretation of social Darwinism. Mussolini was not himself a racist. The mix of fascist police state & racism created Naziism, such as we today see on the sidewalks of New York.
Mussolini made rewarding talent an explicit part of fascist philosophy. Mussolini & Hitler, if no Augustuses, were intelligent men of taste. Both condemned the ugliness of both commercial capitalist and Stalinist materialist culture. Their public works in Berlin and Rome were among the most aesthetic architecture in this unaesthetic century. Hitler's were destroyed by Allied bombers, but Mussolini's can be seen in Roman government buildings today and stand up well beside the great architecture of the classical and Renaissance periods. Unfortunately the same can't be said of Trump's palaces in Giulliani territory, or of Texas prison architecture. Nazi uniforms are the most chic of the otherwise tacky contemporary military period, and are of course still highly collectable. The Lugar pistol is a work of art.
Hitler led Mussolini into a war that was beyond the latter's strategic ability. Hitler had enough military talent for both, but over-extended himself egoistically & fatally. The Russian peasants defeated Hitler, and the US took credit for it. Today a US-dominated world is becoming as much a fascist nightmare as anything Hollywood can make up in exaggerating the actual evil of the Nazis. Hitler's Biblical sexual morality led him to persecute homosexuals. The US police state persecutes homosexuals & the president's heterosexual perversions as wall. At least Hitler permitted himself to practice his own heterosexual perversions in peace.
While the capitalists invented mustard gas and the Bomb, the Nazis invented the V-2 rocket, leading to the space age, & methedrine, now referred to in the Drug War as Hitler's Revenge.