Essentially, liberalism is a moralistic ideology. Its prescriptions are all on the level of abstractions, ungrounded in anything real. You see this in seminal liberal thinkers like Locke and Hobbes: they start, not from a consideration of history, but from a hypothetical “free, autonomous individual” existing in a “state of nature.” Liberal society ultimately tries to institutionalize the entire realm of human interaction, so that nothing remains which is not intelligible from the principles of liberalism.

Of course, this is doomed to fail, because liberal ideas and liberal institutions are like finance capital: all spun out of thin air. Reality, history, people, the inner tendencies of economic systems, will all eventually have their say, and it will be against liberalism and capitalism. That’s what I mean by the material base in this context: the concrete as opposed to the abstract. Liberalism is at war with the concrete, and whenever it rears its head (or appears to) they call it fascist. It’s why (for instance) they can call Russia fascist for acting rationally in the Ukraine, and pretend that the Ukrainian government – which is run by, you know, actual committed fascists – is some sort of “true democracy.”