I have been a... classical liberal for most of my life... - Francis Fukuyama

On the left you had a different aspect of individual autonomy that was pushed to an extreme, which really had to do with the autonomy that individuals have to create their own lifestyles. ...[T]he basic concept of liberal autonomy has to do with your ability to make moral choices, but as time went on the emphasis came to be not on making the right moral choices within an existing moral framework, but rather to be able to make up that framework on your own, that that was the ultimate expression of individual human freedom, and it has obvious problems for a society because all societies have to be based on shared norms that allow people to coordinate their actions, to communicate, and the like... [I]f you believe that the rules can be... set by anybody and that transgressing existing rules is automatically a good thing, you're not going to have... a stable society.

The pragmatic justification is that liberalism is... a political doctrine that seeks to enable societies to govern themselves over diversity. It arose in the minds of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf... as a result of the European wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation.

Now the argument that I make in my book is that part of the current disaffection with liberalism is not from any of its basic principles, but... is the result of certain deformations of liberal principles that were carried to extremes that led... to bad outcomes... [T]here's a move in this direction on the right and... on the left.