This is why liberalism is an unintuitive political arrangement, and why it has always been necessary to make the case for it. Perfectionism and perfectionist ideas are in many ways much more natural. In fact, around the world, in every major civilization, some form of perfectionism represents the older, indigenous strain of political thinking. This may be because perfectionism takes the resources that we use to organize small-scale communities and attempts to scale them up, to apply them at the level of the nation-state. Liberalism, by contrast, has no correlates at the small-scale or community level, and so it is extremely non-obvious as a template for the organization of human society.

Joseph Heath (2020). The Machinery of Government. Public Administration and the Liberal State. p 115-116