Sholto Byrnes stands up for liberalism

From today's New Statesman:

Perhaps the seeds of liberalism's downfall as a specific political movement were sown by its very success. After all, it is not democracy itself (a process that can lead to the election of the most illiberal extremists) that we revere today, but liberal democracy.

It is liberalism's misfortune that framing, as it does, the constitutional parameters, it struggles to find a distinctive voice against the more boisterous and simplistic creeds that spar within those borders.