Liberalism starts with the individual and builds politics around personal autonomy, but people aren’t isolated individuals floating outside society, We belong to families, communities, nations, and traditions that existed before us and that we have a responsibility toward.
The idea that liberalism is somehow politically neutral is just as questionable,
no state is neutral when it places individual choice and liberal rights above every competing idea of the common good.
Freedom cannot mean simply removing every restraint on individual behavior,
without some shared moral and social framework, “freedom” can easily become nothing more than the right to follow whatever preference one happens to have.
A serious political order has to ask more than what individuals are free to do, It also has to ask what we owe each other, which institutions are worth preserving, and what values are worth passing on.