The officially designated “fascist” states of the 20th century were lead by autocrats. But if you actually look at the economic and social goals they were advancing, they were trying to create states that were anti-foreign/pro-national, turned businesses into the servants of the state, and are highly concerned with keeping everything orderly and non-controversial. They’re very much “the nail which stands the tallest will get the hammer” sorts.
And that’s actually a fairly common set of criteria across much of the planet. A lot of East Asia follows that standard, and I feel like it’s even more widespread than that. The Italian and German fascists were just unique in feeling a need to go out and proactively destroy anything they thought would be harmful to the state. The Japanese used a similar rational for their conquest of China before WWII.
And granted, it’s that sort of Italian/German fascism that people mean when they speak of fascism, so it’s talking about something else (e.g., Chinese Corporatism - PDF) if you remove the ‘autocracy’ element. But I would argue that this is just the modern world, corrected equivalent, just as one might say that social safety nets and anti-classist legislation are the modern world, corrected versions of Communist and Socialist states.
I lived in Japan. The country is racist, sexist, and squanders a lot of potential by failing to think internationally. The ruling party’s belief that it knows how to fix everything and can fix everything is certainly not correct, and its hostility to foreigners is more likely to get it blown up by North Korea or one of its other neighbors than if they just started opening up their economy to local trade. People who the police think committed a crime are summarily taken away, beaten into a confession, and thrown into the world’s most uncomfortable cell until they’re broken and released back into the general population.
But it’s also not Nazi Germany. They’re not rounding up Southeast Asians and having them gassed, there’s no dictator going around making insane demands, and they aren’t invading their neighbors. The crime rate is non-existent and most of the people consider themselves to be living in a 50s like peaceful, successful existence because everything is orderly and dependable.
I personally enjoy the sloppy mess of freedom and individuality. But that’s probably not true for most of the population. Our ancestors were, after all, pack animals. Most people want to quietly be happy members of the pack, feeling safe and having an enemy to blame for everything bad. This way of organizing the state is, I suspect, really about as good as it gets for the majority. If instead of a rural/urban divide we had a wealthy/not-wealthy political division in the country - or any division where one side was massively larger than the other - I’d say that we’d probably be screwed if a neo-fascist was able to gain control of the country, on the backs of that majority. We’re probably safe, with Trump, because the rural vote is not the majority.
But, for the titular question, the path to fascism for most countries looks like the path to a country with social welfare programs, or a country with an open market economy. It’s usually something that happens over time, on the back of small measures that add up over time, as things morph from one political ideal to another. Japanese ‘Statism’ mellowed itself out, but hasn’t strayed all that far. Chinese Maoism has briskly paced over towards the Japanese and Singaporean models over the course of the last ~50 years.
What the question really should be is, “What does the rise of a political strongman look like?”