At a time when populists on the right and progressives on the left seem increasingly willing to abandon liberalism, Francis Fukuyama has offered a welcome defense in Liberalism and Its Discontents. The kind of liberalism he defends is “classical”; and his argument is that liberalism’s fiercest critics have uniformly missed the mark in focusing their ire not on classical liberal doctrines per se, but on the way “certain sound liberal ideas have been interpreted and pushed to extremes.”...\
Fukuyama follows John Gray in defining liberalism in terms of four broad characteristics. It is individualist in asserting the moral primacy of the person over the collective, egalitarian in affording the same legal and political status to all citizens, universalist in viewing all human beings as possessing the same moral dignity, and meliorist in affirming the improvability of all social and political arrangements.
Fukuyama’s thesis about sound doctrines being pushed to extremes applies to the left and the right in modern liberal regimes. His critique of the right...certain 20th-century economists and politicians under their sway transformed a valid set of liberal ideas about individual autonomy and private property into something like an anti-state religion: they came to worship free markets, deregulation, and privatization; they touted personal responsibility as a cure-all for dependency on the state; and they viewed “consumer welfare” as the ultimate criterion of social health.
...But his argument is not so much that their thinking was wrong, as that it was sometimes exaggerated and crudely applied....
...The problem of pushing sound liberal insights too far is not limited to the right: it also occurs on the left. Fukuyama criticizes the left’s tendency to overvalue autonomy in the form of “self-actualization” and the “elevation of choice over all other human goods.” He refers to this as the “sovereign self.” More often, it is referred to as expressive individualism, a “yearning for fulfillment through the definition and articulation of one’s own identity,” as Yuval Levin writes. For Fukuyama, the ultimate result of this tendency is a profound meaninglessness: “an autonomous self that has been detached from all prior loyalties and commitments,” a person “wholly without character, without moral depth.” Fukuyama points out that the road is short from such meaninglessness to the phenomenon of identity politics, where meaning is found in diverse groups seeking political recognition.
Fukuyama’s critique of the left also includes a quick survey of “critical theory” and a highly compressed rebuttal....
...But Fukuyama does not think that conservative critics have any reasonable alternatives to liberalism....
...Fukuyama is similarly doubtful that any credible alternatives to liberalism will come from the left....