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It's a classic, but it's also wrong, and I'm tired of seeing it repeated as an aphorism.
Take Einstein, who is good at physics but bad at designing refrigerators and being President of Israel. If you care about keeping your food cold and being an effective advocate for Israeli interests, he'd seem pretty stupid to you. If you judged a doctor on his handwriting or a parapalegic on his ability to run, they'd seem stupid, too.
Outside of partisan politics, it is indeed possible for someone to be incredibly stupid in something and incredibly smart in another. Linus Pauling recommending superdoses of vitamin C. Noam Chomsky in anything that has to do with politics. Ben Carson in literally every category but neurosurgery. We know that these contradictions exist in real life, that these nuances do happen, not just with people, but with groups.
But then the quippy liberal says 'fascists blah blah, weak and strong', as if it means anything, if it isn't just them quoting something trite and banal and passing it off as wisdom if you don't think about it for more than a minute.
Why is it a "quippy liberal"? Do conservatives care not about doublethink? I hold quite a few beliefs that would be marked conservative. Conservatives will point out the same kind of thing is happening when liberals trot out narratives that trump is too stupid to run a casino yet also somehow the greatest threat to democracy the world has ever seen.
It isn't a trite and banal one off. It is a pretty effective test to notice when a piece of media is propagandizing for one side or another.
I wouldn't say mentioning it is inherently pointing to fascism, although reductio ad hitlerum has clearly linked it in many people's minds. That and being on Umberto Eco's list, but basically all political discourse is on that list. So I would discount that entirely.
I'm also confused as to your conflation of this particular bon mot with domain specific expertise. That is not what it is trying to point out at all.
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