Every argument I've ever had with a liberal about the family has involved them basing their arugments on the extreme cases rather than the typical cases, and has demonstrated their vast over suspicion towards the family and a near total lack of suspicion towards the state.
I have no doubt that families can be abusive and dyfunctional in many ways, but this relationship is human scale, and is one that in extremis we can in fact escape, whereas by definition it is very hard to escape or find easy recourse against an overmighty government.
The modern day liberal begins with the presumption that a very extreme and individualistic form of negative liberty from our neighbours is good and vital, and works back from that assumption.
So despite the limited and contestable demands of communal and familial authority, the average liberal will end up seeing state power as relatively unproblematic and resolvable, whilst seeing all other forms of collective power as illegitimate and unaccountable.
Thus they end up endorsing the least accountable form of power and condeming the most accountable forms, because they massively overvalue sheerly abstract forms of liberty & accountability, whilst entirely missing the oldest and basic one of an authority you can directly confront
Time and time again they will think they are avoiding the exercise of any kind of power over the individual, when in fact when every human claim of duty or authority is rejected, the vacuum is necessarily filled by inhuman and impersonal forms like money, law and bureaucracy.
The more areas of autonomy that are discovered and asserted, and the more that this autonomy is deepened and perfected, the more that these impersonal forms of power grow and dominate our lives. Visible bonds of customary tradition are swapped for these pitiless invisible chains.
What they miss perhaps most of all, is that a strong family, neighbourhood, guild or faith community is the best possible tool to GET accountability from the state, and that liberty and justice is always contested, must always be actively won and secured, & we can't do it alone.
