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I often think of liberalism as a bell jar: since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is essentially no competing world view that people in the west are exposed to. Everyone they meet are some kind of liberal. Liberals call each other "liberals" as an insult. The "communists" are really liberals, the "alt-right" are really liberals, when you scratch beneath whatever surface label they've applied to themselves all you find is a liberal. On the one hand this is a reflection of the blinding success of liberalism but also has resulted in a significant weakening of liberalism as an effective mode of governance.
To treat liberalism as an inevitable endpoint, or a universal truth, or some manifestation of the underlying laws of the universe; it undermines what made liberalism triumphant and successful.
I imagine there were more than a few Germans who were born and remembered life under monarchy in the German Empire. Then they witnessed the fall of the monarchy and transformation to a Republic after the abdication in 1918. They lived in the Weimar Republic and witnessed the fall of the Republic to a fascist government under Hitler. Then the fall of National Socialism to a Communist government. And then the fall of Communism to a liberal Democracy. You have to wonder the cynicism that ideological thrashing would build into a person, and the gullibility of the people who truly believe "finally, we have reached the Truthful Solution."
Liberalism is only successful because its adherents truly believe in it and cannot imagine anything else. The second it's regarded as anything other than an inevitable endpoint, or universal truth, is when it is going to fail.
I think you underestimate the strength of liberalism. In the darkest days of 1940-41 when it was Britain alone against Germany, many were happy to write it off as an annoyingly obstinate but ultimately dead ideology. Yet the liberal democracies ended up thrashing the autocracies; not only crushing them under the weight of the combined outputs of the arsenals of democracy but ultimately converting them as well.
Perhaps liberalism will wither and decay. Perhaps some other, superior, more evolutionarily fit ideology will take its place. But I'm not betting against it just yet.
Liberalism made an alliance with Communism to make that happen. Something which both liberals and communists like to gloss over.
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