Norm distinguishes between two kinds of liberalism: one which, in the face of terror, forgets "how fragile and in need of defence the values and institutions of liberalism can be" and one which, on the contrary, "knows, not only the meaning of a necessary and unavoidable fight, but also that the values of liberalism, and precisely the values of liberalism, set certain limits to tolerance, and to 'understanding' in the complaisant sense of that much abused word."
This distinction runs along much the same lines as one that John Gray argues for in the interview I posted below:
[P]olitics comes in when you have irreconcilable ideals or irreconcilable interests which nonetheless have to be reconciled – you have to live with each other. Now modern liberal thought is characterised by the goal of keeping religion at bay. Partly because religion, like all other greater goods, love, art, is dangerous and carries great evils with it. That’s just in the nature of greater goods. But it’s also partly because liberals have been adamant, to the extent that they subscribe to some version of the Enlightenment project, that religion either would become a kind of mild deism, as Voltaire thought, or that it would die out altogether. So it’s not only that politics is about competing goods, though you’re absolutely right to say that, it’s that early modern politics, just like the politics we’re now experiencing much later on the modern period, was to do with reconciling the goods of civil order and civil freedom with religion. Now, in that regard, none of the early liberals thought of religious freedom as a completely unencumbered good. They thought of freedom of [religious] practice as being necessarily circumscribed by the conditions of peace. And I think that crucial Hobbesian and Spinozistic insight (a) has been lost, and (b) is highly relevant.