I stumbled across a wiki article about Oswald Mosley and the Battle of Cable Street (In the UK 1936) and it got me wondering about what sorts of ideas political fascists used to sell the idea of Fascism that got average people to favor it.
To this day it's still common practice for political movements to preach promises and ideals of one sort that aren't really in line with the real nature of the movement's politics.
When I went researching what exactly fascism is (because it occured to me that I really had no idea what it actually was aside from 'Italy and Nazi Germany during WWII), every description I found of it still appeared rather unappealing. No doubt I'm not in the right position to understand the context that could make some of those ideals favorable, but I wondered if perhaps there was also the case of it being misrepresented to the people at the time. Arguments and offers made by politicians that actually would sound appealing, and get so many people on board.
Fascism is very much a product of its time-- you have to keep in mind that the entire Western world was still nursing a hangover from World War I, and that governments of the era were suffering a crisis of legitimacy. Entire cohorts of young men had been wiped out by the war, and the grand empires that had dominated the Western world for hundreds of years had simply vanished. The German monarchy? Dismantled and humiliated by its enemies. Russia? Taken over by the Communists. Austria? Dismembered by the Allies and cut into a bunch of independent ethnic homelands with scores to settle. (I'm going to include Japan as part of the Western world for the purposes of this argument.)
World War I completely discredited the institutions and ideologies that these governments espoused, even for the winners. This sentiment was stronger in the countries that lost WWI, but the bitterness was still very much present in countries like Italy and Japan, who felt shortchanged by the Peace of Versailles. Hell, France and Britain had won the war, and it was still an open question whether popular constitutional government was really the way forward.
This led to the growth of both hard left and hard right movements, both of which rejected the institutions and ideologies that had gotten the Western world into the mess of WWI in the first place. And after the Crash of 1929, Western governments' inability to combat the economic misery of the Great Depression only added fuel to the fire.
(To put it in a modern context: during the Great Recession of 2008-2012, U.S. unemployment peaked at 10%, and there were protests in the streets. During the Great Depression, U.S. unemployment peaked at 25%, and prominent industrialists plotted to overthrow Roosevelt-- until the plot was exposed by the general that they tried to enlist.)
In contrast, the corporatist, authoritarian hard right (and the Communist hard left) were untainted by WWI. The Japanese ultra-nationalists, the Nazis, and the Fascists all had legitimacy that the main-line political parties lacked. And to their credit, hard right economic policies were extremely effective at combating the Great Depression. In Germany, for instance, the Nazis managed to fix the German economy by spending huge sums of money on infrastructure and rearmament. For a populace that had gone through unstable, incompetent Weimar government, the Nazis brought stability, prosperity, and an end to the boom-bust cycle that had characterized the last fifteen years.
Given the hard right's success at dealing with the Depression, it's not a surprise that people bought into the rest of their program.