Phillip Blond ( Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it ) offers a succinct summary of why liberal political order descends to tyranny.  Liberalism is, on Blond’s definition, a political order erected on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally atomistic individual beings.  Once that is in place, and once we have the added notion that the state exists to protect the individual choices of said individuals, we have created the conditions for unlimited policing: “the single individual is continuously threatened with expulsion from that very society of which individuality is supposedly the very basis: everyone is every day a potential traitor and there is always a justification at hand for the latest extension of surveillance or control.  That exercise of creative choice which the liberal system exists to legitimate, it must simultaneously be able easily to ban - merely because any actualised freedom of choice by one person inevitable threatens the potential freedom of choice of another.”

This dynamic leads to the extension of state power in another way as well.  Liberalism’s individualism cannot work in practice; in practice, the liberal state has to reckon with interconnected individuals.  One person’s choice to promote racist ideas - which, given liberalism’s professed commitment to a-telic politics, has to be tolerated - of course offends the sensitivities of others.  But then the question is, Whose choices are going to be honored?  Without an account of the common good, there is no settled answer to that.  It becomes simply a question of power: Whose freedom is honored depends on who’s in charge.