The liberal hope was that we could bracket the deepest questions and still build a workable common life. The hope was generous and on the whole fruitful. But it was not neutral. It was itself an answer — and the answer is now visible in the questions the state will and will not allow itself to ask.
A neutral state is a state with no opinion about the human good. Such a state has never existed and cannot. Every legal regime privileges some goods, suppresses others, and assumes a particular picture of the kind of being it is governing. The picture may be thin (the autonomous chooser of preferences) or thick (the rational animal ordered to flourishing), but it is always there. The choice is not between metaphysics and no metaphysics; the choice is between metaphysics that is examined and metaphysics that is unexamined.
The choice is not between metaphysics and no metaphysics; the choice is between metaphysics that is examined and metaphysics that is unexamined.
The questions a state cannot avoid
Every state must answer, in its laws and procedures, what a person is, what a family is, when life begins and ends, what counts as harm, what speech is free, what work is dignified, and what allegiance citizens owe. There is no view from nowhere on any of these. The pretense of neutrality is itself an answer — usually the answer that takes the procedural for the substantive, and so quietly enthrones whatever the procedure happens to favor at this moment.
This is not a complaint against liberalism per se. The procedural mind has solved real problems. But the more honest defense of liberalism is that its substantive commitments — to dignity, to equality before the law, to the limited state — are good ones. That defense is available. It is just not the defense that says nothing is being defended.
The realist citizen is not anti-liberal; the realist citizen is a liberal who has stopped pretending the position has no content. With the content acknowledged, the conversation can resume. Without it, the conversation becomes a quarrel about who gets to enforce a neutrality that nobody has.