Recommended readings: Liberalism and its discontents by Francis Fukuyama

In his book "Liberalism and its discontents", Francis Fukuyama revisits critically his earlier views of "The End of History" and makes new observations about the status of liberal democracy twenty years into the 21st century. 

Fukuyama starts by defining liberalism in the widest possible way:

By “liberalism,” I refer to the doctrine that first emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century that argued for the limitation of the powers of governments through law and ultimately constitutions, creating institutions protecting the rights of individuals living under their jurisdiction. 

Classical liberalism is a big tent that encompasses a range of political views that nonetheless agree on the foundational importance of equal individual rights, law, and freedom.  

And makes a clear distinction with plain democracy: 

Democracy refers to rule by the people, which today is institutionalized in periodic free and fair multiparty elections under universal adult suffrage. 

Liberalism in the sense I am using it refers to the rule of law, a system of formal rules that restrict the powers of the executive, even if that executive is democratically legitimated through an election.

He finds that, after a triumphant expansion after the fall of the Soviet Union and China's opening to some degree of free market, global capitalism, a new series of challenges have risen from within liberal democracies, both established and new.

Right- and left-wing populism has captured the dissatisfaction of those groups left relatively behind or even threatened by global liberal democracy and free markets.

From the right, rising immigration from developing and Third World countries exacerbated by liberal policies pursued in the US by the Democratic party and in the EU by the center from the left Schengen consensus combined with the 2008 financial crisis and rising unemployment has fueled the rise to power of strong nationalist and xenophobic right-wing populism.

In established liberal democracies, it is the liberal institutions that have come under immediate attack. Leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, Brazil’s Jair Bolsanaro, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and America’s Donald Trump were all legitimately elected, and have used their electoral mandates to attack liberal institutions in the first instance. These include the courts and justice system, nonpartisan state bureaucracies, independent media, and other bodies limiting executive power under a system of checks and balances."

And also a rise in left-wing populism in Spain, the US, and Latin America

Liberalism has been challenged in recent years not just by populists of the right, but from a renewed progressive left as well.The critique from this quarter evolved from a charge—correct in itself—that liberal societies were not living up to their own ideals of equal treatment of all groups.

There is ample evidence that democracy not necessarily favors liberal systems, particularly when these bring rising unequal outcomes for certain groups -blue-collar native whites on the Right and immigrants from illiberal cultures on the Left.

These new realities are turning upside down the traditional Right and Left political constituencies and clientele: blue-collar workers vote for Far Right candidates and immigrants fleeing Third World socialism vote for an open-borders Left in the EU.

A growing polarization goes hand in hand with ethnic, class, and nationalistic divisions fueled by populist vote-capturing rhetoric. 

Fukuyama notices a growing number of democracies that are turning illiberal by exacerbating the power of an executive strongman favored by local ethnic majorities: blue-collar whites in the US follow if not Trump, "trumpist", 'Tea Party" nationalistic ideas. In Europe, France's centrist government is under siege from the "yellow jackets" disaffected native French rejecting liberal "elites" that tolerate massive unassimilated Islamic immigration. The same situation occurs in all of Western Europe. Russia is also promoting a pan-Slavic, pan-Russian redesign of the post-WWII borders following ethnic and linguistic lines.

The Left wing's challenge to liberal democracy in Latin America and Europe also exploits historical ethnic nationalism -from the pre-Colombian descendants in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina carving land through rewriting constitutions and referendums to the Catalan and Basque separatists in  Spain-.

The world that Fukuyama describes bears an eery resemblance with the one that preceded WWI a hundred years ago. The war in Ukraine resembles the territorial annexations and alliances that triggered both World Wars of the 20th century.