[I]n a liberal society you're not going to agree on the deepest... moral frameworks, but you are going to agree on factual information, and... if you… - Francis Fukuyama

There was... an attack on the individualistic premise that underlies liberalism through a new kind of identity politics. There is a liberal form of identity politics that says that liberalism does not live up to its promises of the equal treatment of individuals. So... black people, other racial minorities, women, LGBTQ people, have been marginalized and excluded from... full participation in the promise of a liberal... rule of law... [I]dentity politics was simply a means of mobilizing people and getting them to push for their inclusion. So that's a liberal and... perfectly acceptable and... desirable understanding of identity. But there is another view that's grown up very powerfully, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world... places like the United States or Britain or Australia, where identity politics is seen as an attack fundamentally on the individualistic premise of liberalism. That is to say, individuals are not really free. They're determined by the categories, the racial, gender and other categories into which they are born, and that the society needs to respect not what they do and decide as individuals, but to look first to that category, the racial, ethnic, gender category, and use that as the means of determining... the distribution of resources, hiring, promotion, the other goods that society offers, and that... is fundamentally illiberal. It divides the society which had previously been held together through a set of... common values shared by individuals, into a society of groups, and at the end of that process you can ultimately end up with a place like Lebanon or Bosnia where identity politics... defines the whole of politics...[T]here is a kind of effort to move our modern liberal democratic politics in that kind of identity based direction, coming out of the contemporary left.

The one on the right concerned the shift from an older understanding of economic liberalism to what is now called "neoliberalism." Neoliberalism is not... a synonym for capitalism. I don't see how you can have any kind of modern economy without a market based economy. Neoliberalism took that basic insight and stretched it to an extreme seeking to deregulate, privatize and basically pull back the role of the state, which many neoliberals regarded as simply obstacles to individuals, to entrepreneurship, to economic growth, and as a result markets did their usual work. They produced a great deal of inequality, as... global corporations searched for very small cost advantages by moving jobs to low cost areas... [T]hey destabilized the global economy in certain important ways by deregulating the financial sector. As a result of the deregulation that occurred in the 1980s and 90s we had an escalating series of financial crises. In the sterling crisis, the Asian financial crisis, Argentina, Russia, and finally culminating in the big American subprime crisis in 2008. The... cumulative effects of this instability were political and they were very serious because many ordinary people were hurt... a lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, and the elites that ran these big banks and financial institutions suffered only a momentary disruption in their incomes, and went on to continue to dominate their respective economies... [T]his had a direct impact on the rise of populism in subsequent years, both on the right and on the left.

Liberal values like tolerance and individual freedom are prized most intensely when they are denied: People who live in brutal dictatorships want the simple freedom to speak, associate, and worship as they choose. But over time life in a liberal society comes to be taken for granted and its sense of shared community seems thin.