Liberalism has outlived its use. In the 21st century we're going to see the continuation of the divorce between liberalism and "democracy," (to the extent that liberalism ever had it) because the liberalization of Western capitalism is increasingly unrelated to the bourgeois-democratic development of the rest of the world (this is the cause of the global crisis). This is going to bring us in direct conflict with the pro-imperialist fishhook liberals, who believe they have rediscovered the connection between liberalism and democracy that was prematurely severed by the 20th century anti-imperialist left.

The US was highly offended by Russia in 2014. The way Russia counterbalanced the supposedly "democratic" expansion of NATO was interpreted as a direct challenge to liberal hegemony over global capitalism, which is undermined by balances of power. It has nothing to do with Russia invading more places, but the need to nip this problem in the bud before it interacts with other ones like in the Middle East. That could snowball together into one big crisis of imperialist control over world capitalism, which has existed since capitalism became a world system in the first place. Everyone is trying to deal with how globalization, the rapid expansion of this world system, is paradoxically undoing imperialism by bringing the technological development and bourgeois production which was previously only present in the imperial core to the imperial periphery. One of the reasons is that the expansion of liberalism stalled, and one of the walls it hit was in Donbass and Crimea which as frozen conflicts would slow the integration of Ukraine into the imperial core system of NATO and the EU.

Liberals are hopelessly lost in modern conditions, globalization has led them to being most threatened by a crisis of capitalist expansion. They've become a primary source of rationalizing this crisis.

If capitalism isn't relegating non-class contradictions to the dustbin of history through Liberalism, then, rather than accept this as the natural order, the way right-libs do, the left-libs and socdems (your AOCs and Bernies) just tail the position of the developed heights of capitalism and its promise of creating a more modern bourgeois elite that wages a struggle within the ruling class. Regardless, both sides essentially give up on the promise of bourgeois "democracy" which is the prerequisite for class struggle.

This is how in the West people are coping with the explosion of non-class contradictions (the so-called "identity politics), like core-periphery, which occurred paradoxically after the world united under one capitalist world system led by the USA. These contradictions have completely halted the expansion of liberal capitalist unipolarity. US liberals have slid into denying that liberalism is failing to overcome these non-class contradictions, because it means capitalism is reproducing the divisions they represent (like divisions of post-Soviet nationalities) and this would indict liberalism as no longer being progressive in a critical time for capitalism (globalization). Instead imperial core libs invert this and argue that liberalism is actually fighting these contradictions out to overcome them and save their global democratic mandate. This false progressivism based on reactionary battles between nations and factions of the ruling class has only driven liberalism deeper into crisis. It's concluded with libwashing the imperialist exploitation of a national antagonism between, among other things, Russians and Ukrainians.