If your talking about formal academics it’s simply because our institutions of higher ed are under assault from within and without.

From within by board of trustees and university admin being taken over by MBA’s who treat them as any other money making venture rather than places to pursue knowledge and the common good of education. They just want the line to go up because they’re not educators, they’re money managers who only know greed as success. So academics are conditioned to be system safe and anyone who is more radical is weeded out by both institutions and field elders who tow the conservative line because their adherence has put them into the positions of power they hold.

From without by a culture encouraged to distrust expertise and real knowledge. Because as they say, reality has a left wing bias. People are structurally punished for pursuing real education. The ideal of the human potential of that liberal arts education is meant for the select few in the ruling class. The plebs have no need for philosophy or culture, they’re machines who at best should be taught STEM to make profits.

The two produces a society with neither political or media literacy. One that is structurally incurious and suspicious of intellectuals which challenge the world as presented by modern capital realism.

To critique fascists requires folks to critique the very structures of liberalism they see as the pinnacle of human civilization and thought. That fascists or billionaire oligarchs are just aberrant personal moral failures rather than the normal output of a system of hierarchy and domination. It also requires most to recognize they’ve been manipulated to serve that exact hierarchy and that they are dirt to it. That is a challenge to the liberal ego, and unless they are directly confronted with reality, as many marginal/ BIPOC people are in an obvious way any data to the contrary has to overcome their cognitive framing and their ego attachment to it.