Kerry may have been the more "liberal" candidate in the sense that Rush Limbaugh uses it (more left-wing/socialist), but that's not the kind of "liberal" which Fukuyama was talking about.
Truth is, by the historical (and European, I think) meaning of the term, the more liberal candidate was Bush. And liberalism won.
Perhaps it's time to return to the OED definitions and brand Kerry and his ilk as "socialists" and "totalitarians" and lose the cutesy "liberal" tag.
I suspect a translation problem between "liberalism" and classical liberalism.
True. The semanticists of a half century ago suggested that we use subscripts to specify just which one of the several meanings of a word we have in mind, and it's not such a bad idea in this case.
There are "liberalisms" that can sustain themselves in various ways, and "liberalisms" that lack the necessary fiber to preserve themselves or the social order that produced them. So what we're probably seeing is a return to an earlier conception of liberalism. The "bourgeois" or middle class liberalism of the 19th century was much sterner, more individualistic, and less "caring" and self-indulgent than late 20th century "post-bourgeois" liberalism.
When late liberalism looks excessively feeble and unlikely to survive, societies naturally return to the ideas of the older, more moralistic liberalism with its ideas of responsibility, rather than entitlement. You can call it "conservatism" if you like, but it's not "anti-liberalism" in the way that Europeans understand that word.