Fair point, but during all that time information was centralized. You couldn't talk to people from the next city-state over, you couldn't read the holy text, you would never see the consequences of slavery, you wouldn't hear another country's public radio use car ownership as the premise of a joke, you couldn't see the victims of genocide livestream their slaughter.

With the free internet, every day is an experience that we have more in common with people across the world than with capital owners.

Why would they be resorting to something as self-destructive as fascism if they weren't desperate? Do you think billionaires like kissing Trump's ring and losing billions on protectionism? They just prefer it over equality.