And this is what has happened to liberalism, he says. Rather than being what it began as, a “narrowly political strategy for living peacefully in a world of inexorably clashing comprehensive views of reality and the human good,” liberalism has for many become that comprehensive view of reality and the human good. Your neighbor’s ideas are no longer different. They are heretical. Liberalism could become the problem that it was intended to solve.

(Rod Dreher of The American Conservative digs into this idea that there is a “Church of Illiberal Liberalism,” and points readers to an excellent old interview with the Catholic lawyer James Kalb that puts flesh on the bones of the liberalism-as-religion notion.)

But there’s a second point Linker makes, one that should ultimately restore the old-style liberal’s faith that intolerance is not the inevitable consequence of toleration. Linker suggests the idea in play here is that there should be a “liberation of the autonomous individual from all constraints originating from received habits, traditions, authorities or institutions.” But habits, traditions, authorities and institutions are what make societies. Throw economics, technology and geography into the mix and you have a basically complete account of the forces that shape human life in communities. So “liberating” the individual from those forces becomes an enormous task.