It's not quite that ambiguous. I find that when you're willing to engage with fascist rhetoric and the underlying worldview, you can see the patterns emerge that these scholars have pointed out.

I absolutely agree that (neo)liberal western societies usually only engage with it in order to isolate differences to feel better about themselves. That was my whole point actually. If you understand it's possible that a society or movement partially but not entirely meets the criteria for fascism, that's an actual starting point for a conversation to counteract it. Rather than doing the fig leaf thing from above and say "see we're technically not fascist" as an excuse to shut down that exact conversation.