The best argument against modern liberalism? Your belly button.
Why? You belly button is a reminder that you began life connected to others. You are not a sovereign, autonomous, detached individual. Your very existence came in and through community. To be is to be related. You are not a free floating atom. You are a molecule with organic attachments to others who came before you, who exist alongside you, and who will come after you. You are not rootless. You are a branch on a tree. You are a seed planted in the soil of social relationships, privileges, and obligations. You cannot escape where and who you are from.
Modern, secularized liberalism wants to make the individual sovereign and autonomous, as Rousseau envisioned. Rousseau saw man as born free, then enslaved by the traditions and obligations imposed on him by society. These “unchosen obligations” are the problem.
But a person only comes into existence through the communion of his mother and father. We are connected to others from the moment of conception. The only kind of freedom that truly suits our nature is a structured freedom grounded in reality and ordered to proper ends.
Modern Rousseuean man is a fluid bundle of ever expanding “rights” – rights which, ironically, must be granted and maintained by a managerial, bureaucratic, supposedly neutral state. But it’s just a house of cards build on a foundation of sand. It’s all lies, all the way down. The irony of liberalism is that its radical individualism can only be maintained by radical totalitarianism.
Every egalitarian “rights” movement actually chips away at true liberty because it requires an ever-increasing state to make it work. This is true from feminism to socialism to LGBTQism. They are all unnatural and intrinsically statist. They create a rolling revolution that flattens civil society and ultimately destroys civilization itself.
Your belly button is proof you did not autonously consent to a social contract. Rather you were born into a covenant. You were born into a network of relationships. You are not autonomous but dependent, not self-made or self-defining, but made and defined by the wider community of which you are a part. The whole liberal project aims at dissolving these bonds so we can recreate our identity. This is why those who stand in Rousseau’s tradition can never be happy – they view really itself as oppressive.
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