From the eighteenth century onwards liberalism was defined as a willingness to accept other people’s ideas and beliefs, as well as an openness to new ideas. That tradition is dying, I think it’s fair to say. The reason, as the great Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu argued, was that a society would lose its liberty, even if it had separation of powers and a system of government set up, if the same ideas became uniform throughout its institutions, and subject to the ‘tyranny of opinion’.
