Liberalism is wholly unsuited?
You can reasonably dismiss anyone who thinks swapping out one system for another system will solve our problems.
“Liberalism is wholly unsuited.” Apparently we just need a different system, and that will fix the problem? We can ask this in a general way:
Liberalism versus Socialism versus Fascism versus Communism versus Monarchism versus Anarchism versus Libertarianism. Which is best?
The obvious answer is that none of them are, which is why every human system is a mix of ideas.
I'll note that many of these political conversations happen at a level of abstraction that very much reminds me of the entrepreneurs-in-crisis who hire me to help architect a solution for their startup. The entrepreneurs are often in crisis because they thought about their problems in a vague, abstract way, without getting into details.
The same abstractness is also dangerous in politics. For instance, how can we limit corruption in government? Every system that I listed above can be overwhelmed by corruption, so that merely choosing one of those systems does not fix the problem. Socialism can be corrupt, Liberalism can be corrupt, Fascism is almost always corrupt. Fixing corruption tends to involve specific programs that add accountability and tracking to the movement of money. There are specific programs that you can implement to combat corruption, but those programs are unrelated to any of the above ideologies.
(On the subject of corruption, a good book that I recommend is "The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption" by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi.)
The point is, the lack of specifics tends to suggest a pattern of thinking that leads to failure. And I don't think it matters much which of the above systems someone advocates, that person is going to damage society if they get into power and continue to think in terms of any of the above labels. Real governance consists of details. Abstract political philosophers view political problems at a distance, like an amateur astronomer trying to view the moons of Saturn through a telescope. But actual governance often means getting on the ground with a microscope and observing the shocking amount of turmoil and action that happens in a single square meter of dirt: the hundreds of different insects and plants and molds interacting. Until you’re ready to zoom in on that level of detail, you are not ready to govern.
An example from clients I've consulted with: early in 2022 the Board Of Directors at https://futurestay.com was worried that there was a serious flaw in the company's technology. They had lost faith in the CTO and no longer believed what he said. They invited me in to offer an objective assessment. I spent 6 weeks studying the situation and then delivered my verdict: there were many problems with the technology, and the most serious was the mixing of long-term canonical data with short-term cache data, which lead to endless mistakes when the wrong version of the data was assessed.
The Board Of Directors then used my report to justify the firing of the CTO. And then a new CTO was hired. I was hopeful at this point. But then things began to go off the rails: the old code was written in PHP but the new CTO had only managed teams that had written code in Java, so he was inclined to do a complete re-write to get rid of all of the PHP code and instead build high-quality Java code.
In meeting after meeting I tried to make the point that "PHP versus Java" was a useless distraction because the key issue was the mixing of cache data with canonical data. More so, with a finite amount of investor money, anything that slowed us down was dangerous and doing a complete re-write of all of our PHP code into Java would waste several months. But it's possible my point was too subtle. The Board Of Directors had the sense that the old technology was "bad" -- in an almost superstitious way, they understood there was deep sickness in the old way of doing things, so they were easily swayed to believing that Java would solve all of their problems. And the new CTO pushed this line hard: "Get rid of PHP, rebuild everything in Java."
So what happened? All development on PHP ended and the company stagnated for 10 months while the new Java system was built. And now they are trying to win new customers with their Java system, but they've lost the momentum they used to have. Maybe they will regain it. I really enjoyed working with everyone there and I hope they become extremely successful. But I think they just wasted 10 months on a side-issue.
Some of our political debates have the same level of abstractness. "Get rid of Liberalism and rebuild everything as Communism (or Libertarianism)"" makes as much sense as "Get rid of PHP and rebuild everything with Java." It is completely besides the point. It misses the real issue.
Just as crucial, every human system ever built has been a mixed system with mixed features, so those who seem to think it is possible to fully implement any one system are simply detached from reality.
I'm distrustful of anyone who seems to seriously think the problems of one system can be fixed by introducing a whole new system. That is never true, never. Whatever system you have now, you can probably fix it with specific changes, that take into account the real circumstances which your society faces right now. Anyone who thinks a new system is the right answer is simply not thinking about the issue in enough detail.
The governments of the 20th century dictatorships were almost identical but their economies were a bit different. What fascist “corporatism” really means: Mussolini tried to mash together capitalism and socialism.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/corporatism
I believe that we do need systemic change but I don't think that marxism alone can do it. Leftism seems to see all systems as inherently oppressive and advocates for a society without any formal systems. Conflict theory sees anyone who opposes socialism as fascists which prevents us from properly understanding fascism and countering it. It might be better to see formal systems and informal norms are like hardware and software. They both work together in a functioning system. I believe we need to integrate a variety of perspectives into one unified system which includes but isn't limited to marxism. What the quote gets right is that fascism arises from the collapse of democratic institutions and norms. As Jeremy Bentham said, "Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart."