Heads up, my response is longer than usual.

"Both in some early efforts at Marxist scholarship and in recent academic revivals, socialists have charged against liberalism that its defenders elevate if to a suprahistorical abstraction, an absolute value presumably untainted by grubby interests or bloodied corruptions, whereas in actuality liberalism, like all other modes of politics, arose as a historically conditioned and thereby contaminated phenomenon, and hence must be regarded as susceptible to historical decay and supercession."
- Irving Howe

This is the problem with mainline liberal thought (the left-liberal tradition is much better). You idealise, and therefore de-historicise, liberalism. Suddenly we're transported from the blood-soaked ground to a Platonic abstraction, where, if liberals say nice things that's what really matters. The fact that men (and women) propounding self-determination, freedom and the rights of the individual, have always actively excluded most beings from these considerations, and have laid waste to entire continents doesn't matter. *They said nice things*.

You may counter and say, "but liberalism uniquely self-corrects. Those who were excluded are now within the moral circle". But this, again, loses sight of the historical record. It wasn't self-declared liberals which took the whip from the slave driver's hand and slew him; fought bitterly against the "legions of the Free" in places like Indochina and Sub-Saharan Africa; who turned up with people-power at the polling stations, and *made it* so they had a voice. It was radicals - people the closested do-good liberals said had gone too far, were too "extreme".

But to lay it all on previous generations is itself a problem. Liberals in power *today* are causing untold damage. Take, say, the USA - where "moderates" and "centrists" are denying the public healthcare and a livable planet - because threatening entrenched corporate power and the Market are infringements on liberal rights (rights which they also pretend are natural). And you can also look at what liberal institutions, like the IMF and the big banks, are doing to debtor nations across the globe right now. It isn't pretty.

I guess all I'm asking you to do is to peek past the abstractions, and have a look at what liberal power centres are in fact doing.