It's always a pleasure to come across a piece of advocacy combining clear and direct meanings, rigour in analysis and compelling logical inference. It's the sort of thing you yearn for after reading a hotchpotch of unfounded assertion and arbitrary reasoning like this from Slavoj Zizek (the numbers in square brackets are mine, added for subsequent ease of reference):
 The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (liberal center, populist Right, radical Left), they locate them in a radically different topology: for the liberal center, radical Left and Right are the two forms of appearance of the same "totalitarian" excess, while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, with the populist "radical" Right as nothing but the symptom of... liberalism's inability to deal with the Leftist threat.  When we hear today a politician or an ideologist offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking a (purely rhetorical) question "Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want every critic or mocking of religion to be punished by death?", what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer – who would have wanted that? The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence.  This is why, for a true Leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict – a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other.  One should accomplish here a Hegelian step back and put in question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. Liberals have long ago lost their right to judge.  What Horkheimer had said should also be applied to today's fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk (critically) about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.
There's scarcely a sentence in this that should pass unchallenged.
 I don't care how left or radical you want to be, but saying that there's only a single true alternative and that therefore the putative alternative liberalism-as-against-the-populist-"radical"-Right isn't one but is rather a symptom of something else - this is a political idiocy. It reduces important differences, which can affect the interests and lives of millions of people, to mere counters in a rhetorical game.
 The distinction between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression about which Zizek goes on to wax ironic is likewise as real they come, and if this is 'self-evident', then so be it. It's self-evident because it's true. One can then affirm it, rather than hinting darkly, as he does, that because liberalism has lost its innocence the distinction is somehow less real or important.
 From darkly hinting, Zizek next proceeds to say quite explicitly that the conflict between liberalism and fundamentalism is a false one. It isn't, and to claim the contrary is pernicious nonsense, made no more acceptable by the hand-waving phrase, 'a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other'. No, vicious is keeping girls out of school or throwing acid at them for attending school; vicious is the chopping off of the heads of hostages. One of the things that any genuine liberalism does is to name this as barbaric, to oppose it rather than to 'generate' it.
 Liberals have lost their right to judge. Oh, really. Why have they? Because the record of liberalism has not been unblemished? What, in that case, of the left, radical or otherwise? If we have not lost the right to judge, then neither have they. In truth, everyone has the right to judge. It is part of the meaning of freedom of belief and expression.
 Therefore even those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy are entitled to say what they please about religious fundamentalism. But there's something else we can do, those of us who choose to: we can talk critically about both liberal democracy and religious fundamentalism, but without putting them back to back - as in the 'vicious cycle of two poles' and all the rest of it.
Zizek may be a most learned man, but what sorry claptrap this all is. The only radical left worth the name today is a left which recognizes the disasters that political formations of the left brought upon themselves and others by their constantly belittling references to liberalism, a left which has learned to understand that liberalism is an essential starting point for those with any genuine commitment to democratizing both state and society, and which knows that for all of liberalism's historical shortcomings, a left that is not now itself liberal is not radical at all, it is deluded and lost.