There are defects and gaps in a liberal society that are constantly being filled by other longings and... structures... that sometimes end up undermining that liberal project.

For both the pragmatic... and... moral reasons... liberalism became the dominant doctrine of the 20th century, and should... continue to be defended....

In Kant's words, human beings are uncaused causes, and therefore have infinite value, and a liberal regime protects that autonomy by giving people rights... The right to speak, to organize, to associate, and ultimately to have a share of power by being able to vote. ...This is ...the moral status, the dignity that life in a liberal regime that does respect individual rights, gives us, and it is one of the reasons that to this day, people do not want to live in authoritarian countries that do not recognize the fundamental dignity of their... citizens.

The idea of universal human dignity ultimately comes out of Christianity... the view that all human beings are equal in the sight of God because they have the capacity for moral choice. As Western thought developed in the 17th-18th centuries, this took on a secular form under thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Immanuel Kant or Georg Hegel, who argued that human equality is... based on human autonomy.

Liberalism is... a protection of human autonomy.

After World War II, liberal rights were not something that were only deserved by white Europeans. ...There was a recognition that the black and brown peoples being held in colonial bondage could not consistently be held in that bondage, because liberalism was a universal doctrine. ...That's the other respect in which we can defend liberalism, a moral one.

That liberal world that emerged after 1945 led to one of the most spectacularly successful periods in human history. There was material progress. There was stability. There was human freedom. There was the flourishing of many human activities that can only take place in a liberal, and therefore free society...

Therefore tolerance of diversity, of people that don't believe the same thing that you do, has always been at the core of this pragmatic project to enable diverse populations to live with one another.

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such ... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.