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The brave defenders of Ukraine are hailed as fighting not just for their homeland but for a way of life. It is a fight, we are told, for us.

In this telling Ukraine is ground zero in the battle for the 21st century. What US President Joe Bidenhas framed as a contest between autocracy and democracy.

It begs the question then: just what is this fight for?

Democracy? Russia is a democracy. Unpalatable as it is, the media shackled, opposition silenced or jailed. Vladimir Putin has been described as a new tsar. But elected, he is.

The US is hardly a bastion of democracy itself. The last election descended into lies and conspiracy. Rather than a peaceful handover of power, supporters of Donald Trump ransacked the Capitol building the very seat of American democracy.

Elsewhere democracy has fallen prey to political strongmen, populists and demagogues. They have taken power at the ballot box on a platform of divide and rule.

Democracy globally has been in free fall for more than a decade. Each year there are fewer and fewer free, democratic states.

Rather than a fight between democracy and autocracy, autocracy itself thrives within democracy.

What defenders of democracy are more accurately talking about is liberalism. An animating idea of democracy that claims individualism, freedom, human rights, and rule of law as chief virtues.

Nice in theory, but they have not always been delivered nor proven strong enough against assault.

Liberalism is sometimes cast as a fighting faith, but it is just as easily often derided for its timidity even complicity when confronted by tyranny.

To its critics, liberalism is a question without an answer a torrent of words with no meaning.

The German jurist and one-time NaziCarl Schmittmocked liberalism as an "endless conversation". Marxist revolutionaryLeon Trotsky called it a "debating society". Friedrich Nietzsche said it made people "cowardly".

Liberalism's fondness for tolerance has been seen as a weakness.

As the poetRobert Frostfamously wrote:"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."

In the 21st century, liberalism like democracy is in crisis. Just what does it stand for?

This has been liberalism's fate, to lurch from crisis to triumph to crisis again.

Liberalism was a response to the terror of the French Revolution. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was assailed by war, revolution, communism, and fascism.

Then as now, liberals asked what it meant to be a liberal. Could liberalism resist violent challenge without itself becoming violent?

Isaiah Berlin called it the "liberal predicament" to remain faithful to liberalism may be to fail liberalism.

Political scientist Joshua Cherniss picks up where Berlin left off in his new book, Liberalism in Dark Times.

He identifies the core of this predicament: liberals confront uncertainty while authoritarians harbour no doubts. To quote William Butler Yeats:

"The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

The "worst" believe history bends to their will. Historicism, as it is called, posits that humanity is set on a course and atrocities are excused in order to deliver us to this fate. It can be an apocalyptic vision.

The father of historicism, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, said: "History is a slaughter-bench" upon which we are each sacrificed.

As Cherniss says:"History came to be identified with a story of purifying moral transformation between the children of light and the children of darkness."

Liberalism has been found wanting, holding onto virtues of a humane society while,as Chernisswrites, failing to "recognise the reality of politics".

As he damningly says: "While liberals cherished dreams of civility and innocence, the masses groaned and the world burned."

Cherniss writes not to bury liberalism but to redeem it. What does history teach us?

He identifies several figures who, in dark times, spoke to a different liberalism. These philosophers and writers who identified the liberal predicament.

They saw the weakness of liberalism but also the dangers of liberals staining their own hands in blood, fighting authoritarianism by becoming authoritarians themselves.

Cherniss says these thinkers offered a "tempered liberalism"; "an awareness of liberalism's drawbacks and defects".

Tempered liberals embraced uncertainty, eschewed simple answers, yet remained firm in what they stood for.

As Cherniss says, they approached politics with an "ethos". The antidote to ruthlessness, Cherniss says, "is to be found in the cultivation of a particular ethos".

It is a way of being, informed by values yet not fixed or permanent. Cherniss says these thinkers sought "disagreement and ambivalence".

Cherniss quotes Bertrand Russell defining tempered liberalism as "not in what opinions are held, but how they are held".

Another was the French writer Albert Camus who saw the quality and style of public debate as essential to successful liberalism. Camus' liberalism is "marked by modesty", balancing "demands and extremes".

Camus famously wrote his novel, The Plague a pandemic lays waste to a town, as people are shut down as an allegory of authoritarianism.

He appropriated the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to forever roll a boulder up a hill only for it to return again to the bottom, as a way of speaking back to the certainty of historicism.

Camus saw danger in certainty. "We suffocate among people who believe they are absolutely right," he wrote.

He had flirted with Marxism, but eventually rejected its idea of "finality". Camus was ultimately expelled from the Communist Party in France.

Cherniss concedes Camus does not sit easily within ideas of liberalism, but he offered a moderation that eschewed absolutism or fanaticism.

It was not, though, a moderation that seeks to find balance or resolution it was not a liberalism for "tepid souls" but "burning hearts". "Modest but not mild", a liberalism that stands up to extremists and sets limits.

The likes of Camus were forged in the fire of revolution, war, and persecution. They sought to find light in dark times.

In the second half of the 20th century, liberalism often became the preserve of the comfortable, captured by elites.

It morphed into neoliberalism and the dominance of markets over society. After the end of the Cold War, liberalism fell prey to hubris and triumphalism.

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, channelling Hegel's historicism, declared the "end of history" that liberal democracy was the final destination for all humanity.

Fukuyama now wrestles with the latest crisis of liberalism. In his latest book Liberalism and its Discontents,he concedes Liberalism is assailed from the political left and right.

Liberalism, he says, can appear to some as "an old and worn out ideology that fails to answer the challenges of our times".

Fukuyama though is still a believer. It is less liberalism that has failed than liberals themselves. We need more and better liberalism, not less.

Others, like the philosopher Judith Shklar, warned in the 1950s that liberalism had lost its moral centre. It was used by the powerful against the powerless.

This was Shklar's "liberalism of fear" the wilful "inflicting pain ... in order to cause anguish". Shklar adopted a scepticism that didn't reject liberalism, but wanted to open it to voices too long silenced.

As war rages in Ukraine and China's authoritarianism challenges democracy, where is liberalism?

Do the voices of the 1930s and '40s the voices of tempered liberalism speak to us?

Joshua Cherniss says it is "fashionable to cheer the 'shipwreck' of liberalism and profitable to join in looting the wreckage".

He says we are again suffocated by those "who believe they are absolutely right; we again stand by as humanity is outraged".

The West is less sure of itself, and common ground is harder to find. Authoritarians present themselves with certainty.

That is the appeal, Chermiss says, of the "political strongmen speaking the language of greatness."

There is a need, he says, for ethical resistance and resilience. We need to embrace"heroic ambitions", as Judith Shklar says, "not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims".

In Ukraine, we are seeing courage. Ukrainians may well have their minds just on survival, not the task of saving liberalism for us all.

But when the guns eventually fall silent, Ukrainians like the rest of us will be wondering just what is this liberalism we are fighting for?

Stan Grant is the ABC's international affairs analyst and presents China Tonight on Monday at 9:35pm on ABC TV, and Tuesday at 8pm on the ABC News Channel, anda co-presenter of Q+A on Thursday at 8.30pm.

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As war rages in Ukraine and China challenges democracy, where is liberalism and what does it stand for? - ABC News