Historically both fascist governments and fascist movements require external attack to collapse - or a succession crisis, which takes a while. And a lot of people can get killed along the way.
As for ending up attacking each other I think that is a general authoritarian thing with purging to take/secure power - it happens with communism and it happened with monarchies.
One interesting outlier along the lines was Fascist Spain. It was caused by a chain of events caused by internal attack of fascists for their own cynical reasons. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Luis_Carrero_...] Combined with a secret liberal king, Juan Carlos and the power was used to restore democracy.
No it wasn't. The economic recovery occurred way before the war did.
That's also the "endgame" of pure democracy, and of basically every other "pure" form of government. (Classical Western philosophers knew this very well, BTW - they had very detailed models of how these violent crises happen, and how they lead to different forms of government in turn, with their own inbuilt instability.) It's one reason why sustainable government is pretty much always based on a variety of institutions that enable ongoing checks and balances among different organized interests. It's why we have republics, and not pure ("direct") democracies.
IMHO Leopold Kohr enlightened us about all this, "centralized political and economic structures" are the main culprits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy
Which is to say we need to be clear about our objectives: if free society and individual liberty is important to us, those need to be the goals potentially at the expense of short-term economic growth.
The system of corporations we have today is a super-civilised way of wresting power and control from existing structures - if you can do something better and cheaper than the company currently in power, you can displace them quickly and with minimum fuss.
The core of that mechanism in the west is if you think a companies management are just clueless you can start your own company and compete. That is a big component of what freedom is - if you think you can do it better you can try to do it better.
Non-free societies would almost certainly disrupt that mechanism as the first thing they did. Given how complicated a modern economy is, I'm not sure they'd be competitive with a free society. The inefficiencies would build up to spectacular levels.
Which means that the avenues for practical freedoms are somewhat limited outside of the corporate/mercantile paths.
1. They have set themselves up massive health time-bombs with their pollution and ineffective regulations. Not to mention prevalence of smoking. 2. China's Social Credit plan is creating a turn-key rebellion as the newly created lower caste has nothing to lose but their chains and the high social credit scores means they have a purge list for when bloody repression begets bloody revolution. 3. They have enough people laundering money for 'emergency escape hatches for when they fall out of favor' that they are blowing up real estate prices internationally in major cities. Optimistically it could just be fallacious beliefs that real estate is a foolproof investment but that doesn't make things much better. 4. The party leadership flat out know that they cannot survive a recession and try to prop things up constantly.
They may be the most viable example but they are still vulnerable to collapses - not a guarantee by any means but there is definite precedent.
How free are they? How do I compare that to another country? How much of my view is tinted by not speaking Chinese? I dunno. As a statement of principle, there is no evidence that the top-down economy nut has been cracked, so if they are trying to do that it will fall apart in messy fashion at some point. You can't take your best and brightest, tell them what to study & where to work, then expect a central planner to get the numbers right. There aren't enough geniuses for that to work. You have to let the smart ones figure out what the best use of their time is, like the West has been doing for the last few centuries.
From Wikipedia: "In 1930 the Hertzog government worked to undermine the vote of Coloureds (South Africans of mixed white and non-white ancestry) by granting the right to vote to white women, thus doubling white political power. In 1934 Hertzog agreed to merge his National Party with the rival South African Party of Jan Smuts to form the United Party. A hardline faction of Afrikaner nationalists led by Daniel François Malan refused to accept the merger and maintained a rump National Party called the 'Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party' (Purified National Party). The Purified National Party used opposition to South African participation in World War II to stir up anti-British feelings amongst Afrikaners. This led to a reunification of the Purified Nationalists with the faction that had merged with the South African Party; together they formed the Herenigde Nasionale Party (Reunited National Party), which went on to defeat Smuts' United Party in 1948 in coalition with the much smaller Afrikaner Party. In 1951, the two amalgamated to once again become known simply as the National Party."
So the NP wasn't actually in power during ww2, but came to power fairly shortly afterwards, and enforced ethnic nationalism. Way back when I read Mandela's biography it struck me that this wasn't a historical coincidence, and that the leadership of the NP were very likely Nazi sympathizers, with a pretty long leash to carry out the white nationalist agenda that had been stopped on the global north.
That's how politics work, it's a pendulum. It has swung too far to liberalism, we're almost at Weimar republic now. Now it's time for the pendulum to swing back. If anything, the Internet is going to accelerate it.
In related news, a relative of mine complained that he was receiving fascist posts on Facebook. Thing is, he didn't follow those groups, but one of his friends did, and Facebook's stupid algorithm thought it would share what his friend liked in his news feed, without asking.