Adam Gopnik's book on liberalism, A Thousand Small Sanities, was one of the better political reads of the last decade.  I encourage you to read it if you haven't.  This spring he wrote an essay for the New Yorker (I'm often months behind in reading my New Yorkers, plus they end up in various spots around the house to be picked up again long after they were set down) that defends liberalism from some of the recent projections of its doom.  This essay is also a worthy read.  A good paragraph:

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that “share values”—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently. Certainly, Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today—many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”)—and what happened was not that values changed on their own but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.