But the point is that the government should treat citizens as if they are atomized individuals, not that people should, in fact, be atomized individuals. Liberals believe this idea not because it’s without problems or ambiguities, but because other ideas are manifestly worse. One possibility is horrifying violence to enforce conformity, and the other is a kind of millet system where people’s rights and legal status are circumscribed by their group membership. The latter is workable in authoritarian regimes, but hard to make compatible with democracy and very prone to breakdown. Post-liberal Americans keep stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the extremely obvious problems with their proposed systems. We have all these “integralist” post-liberal Catholics running around who’ll write long essays that just ignore the fact that the country is only 20 percent Catholic. The white evangelical community does not produce as many essayists, but also has its illiberal tendencies and is similarly just 20 percent of the p…