I tend to agree with this basic argument that feckless do-nothing liberalism leads to fascism. If the existing power structure is actively, visibly, constantly working to make people's lives better than fascist messaging is far less effective.

I do think that our current brand of fascism has completely skipped the "make some things better to prove the superiority of our ideology" stage (e.g. "Mussolini made the trains run on time" type stuff.) To say they are actually addressing problems is an absurdity. They can't even cut overall spending like they claim they would. They simply have to use their tens of thousands of media outlets and social media bots to convince people to not believe their eyes while things visibly and rapidly deteriorate.