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A little asked question: Why did liberalism take so long to destroy cultural norms? The notion of private conscience obviously leads to the kind of atomized, nihilistic culture we now live in. Why did it take so long to destroy religion, local community, the family, etc?
Liberalism had to keep those old institutions around in order to ‘liberalize’ culture. It had to reform the church, the local community, the family, etc, and for that process it needed to keep them all on life-support while it sliced them up and rearranged their parts.
There’s a similarity here to how liberalism has to use ‘illiberal’ statist institutions to maintain its global dominance (military, state R&D, etc). You need the old institutions of society in order to produce the new liberal man. But you can fold them up when you’re done.
The point here is this: the state inherits a social system, it has to maintain that social system as part of the process of reforming it, elites disagree over how best to do this. This is then incorrectly interpreted as ‘meeting opposition from below’, but there’s no such thing.
‘Meeting opposition from below’ is how liberals talk about problems within liberalism that involve the difficulty of meeting liberal ends using existing institutions and liberal means (‘incentives’). But it shouldn’t be taken literally; it’s just part of the internal rhetoric.
The reason liberal society didn’t manifest all at once is not because anyone resisted but because of the complex interplay between ends, means, and the social structures liberalism inherited. This is true of all societies at all times. ‘The people’ have never resisted anything.
There is no such thing as ‘resistance’, just what you might call ‘governance puzzles’: the problem of trying to get ends and means to match in an inherited social structure, given your (ideologically) self-limited access to policy space.
