Russia did not become a liberal democracy after the Cold War due to several factors: bad economic policy from American advisors who pushed too-rapid market liberalization without understanding that a functioning state is necessary for markets to work, the shock of losing an empire, and a tradition of Russian national identity understood in terms of regional domination that didn't disappear.

Fukuyama's claim in 1989 was not that everybody would end up in peaceful democracies, but that the historical process of modernization is valuable and real—people don't want to live in poor, chaotic, underdeveloped countries but rather in wealthy stable developed places like Switzerland, Canada, or Britain where they can educate their children and not worry about physical security.

Ukraine has become a genuinely liberal society with a Westernized elite that actually wants to be part of Europe, which Russia completely failed to understand, leading to the expectation of a 48-hour war with Ukrainian surrender and pro-Putin collaborators, a fundamental intelligence failure resulting from Putin's isolation and the fact that everyone around him is too afraid to deliver bad news.

Without economic growth, liberal societies cannot maintain themselves because in a no-growth Malthusian world the only way to get rich is by taking from someone else, making predation a major way people amass fortune and undermining the redistributive policies that make inequality tolerable.

The United States is still a liberal society with significant rule of law and institutional checks, demonstrated by courts preventing Trump from doing things he wanted to do, though these checks are weaker and more vulnerable than they once were.

Some people want to expand their realm of autonomy and have more choices, while other people want the opposite—they want to be told who they are because they're confused, and the variety of identities available in liberal society overwhelms rather than liberates them.

Liberalism is fundamentally based on seeing human societies as collections of autonomous individuals with equal rights that must be protected through a state bound by rule of law and constitutional limits on power, rejecting the idea that the state can do anything it wants.

Liberalism's main pragmatic selling point is that after 150 years of religious warfare and sectarian killing (including the Thirty Years' War which killed roughly a third of Central Europe's population), liberal thinkers argued that instead of building communities around shared religious truth claims about the good life and ultimate purpose, diverse societies should focus on survival together by tolerating people fundamentally different from themselves and building rules for peaceful coexistence.

People empirically vote with their feet and choose to migrate to liberal societies rather than to Russia, China, or North Korea, which demonstrates that liberal societies are superior in what people actually want—law-governed stability, high wealth, education opportunities, and social advancement possibilities.

The End of History refers to the direction that modernization and social evolution is pointing toward (the end as destination, not as stopping), not to a prediction that history will cease or that all societies will immediately become liberal democracies.

The contemporary 'woke' progressive left poses a genuine cultural threat to liberal values by replacing the liberal principle of tolerance with demands for uniformity of thought, and by treating liberalism itself (with its commitments to free speech and due process) as a sham obscuring patriarchal domination.

Liberalism has historically been defeated in the short term by rising ideologies (nationalism and ethnic identity in the 19th-20th centuries) but has come back repeatedly because it alone enables diverse societies with different religions, nationalities, and ethnicities to actually coexist and cooperate rather than engage in zero-sum conflict.

Liberalism is strongly associated with and dependent on the cognitive style of modern natural science—the assumption that there is external reality we can perceive, measure, and experiment with through scientific methods to understand and manipulate the external world, giving rise to modern technology.

Liberal societies also have an ameliorative trend in that liberals believe society can actually get better, making them reformist rather than revolutionary, though they fundamentally believe people are free to make their own choices.

Part of Russia's failure to liberalize could have been avoided if different leaders had been chosen—Boris Yeltsin could have appointed someone other than a KGB agent (Putin) to be the next president of Russia, and the country might have been on a very different path.

Putin's system lacks distributed power and checks on leadership—unlike China which after 1978 created a system of collective leadership where the top leader couldn't make all decisions and had to get consensus, Russia has no such constraint, and this is why Putin is cut off from accurate information and makes catastrophically bad decisions.

If Ukrainian military victory forces a Russian retreat, Putin will likely be removed but probably by someone from within the security apparatus rather than by any external force or democratic movement, and whoever replaces him may be no better and could potentially be worse.

Although environmental crisis and climate change pose serious challenges to liberalism's dependence on economic growth, authoritarian regimes also need growth and will emit as much carbon as liberal ones—China is the major carbon emitter between now and 2050 despite being authoritarian, so regime type doesn't solve the environmental challenge.

Identity politics is an important and historically necessary way of mobilizing people to consciousness of injustice, but the problem arises in what you do about it afterward—if the objective becomes to essentialize fixed identity characteristics (race, gender, etc.) into permanent determinants of social position, this moves away from liberal universalism and toward sectarian systems like Lebanon or Bosnia.

A serious problem with liberalism is that we no longer even agree on basic factual information—vaccine safety, election results—because the internet and social media create parallel information universes with no authority distinguishing good from bad information.