The nation-states carved out of the Russian and Austria-Hungarian empires in the aftermath of WW1 were the most liberal democracies ever.  About 10 years after their founding they were all authoritarian, one party, states.  They crumbled under political impotence and economic collapse before being overwhelmed by Germany and the Soviet Union.

In the US, the former Confederate states never accepted liberal democracy.  For the first 200 years (or so) it was a plantation society, economically dependent on slavery.  For the next 150 years (or so) it has been an economic backwater due to their determination to maintain an apartheid social and political structures, enforced by institutions and by ad-hoc terror organizations, i.e., the Klan, and mob violence.   Abel Meeropol, pen name for Lewis Allen, wrote a poem Bitter Fruit about the regular lynchings of black men by white mobs in the early decades of the 20th Century, when put to music and re-titled Strange Fruit it achieved a certain financial success ... and had zero political impact on the Roosevelt Administration.  And then there was the unlawful exile of American Reds during the 1920s and the incarceration of Japanese during World War II.  

These examples can be repeated: the treatment of Indonesians by the Dutch colonists, the economic exploitation of the Indian sub-continent, the horrifically much worse exploitation of the Congo by the Belgium King, the virtual enslavement of Japanese coal miners by Japanese corporations.  

Now there has been a slow dispersion of liberty and law by the Ruling Elite to an ever-larger privileged group for miscellaneous and varied reasons while pretending to grant liberty and law to others, e.g., the continent of Africa, by the US in the furtherance of political and economic exploitation.  

Thus to claim we are degenerating from some global Golden Age of democratic liberalism is simply not true.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre