The Return of Difference: Haunting Liberalism and Shattering the Illusion of Belonging
The Desintegration of the Democratic Nation
Introductory Note
This is the untold story of liberalism undermining democracy. Far from being its crowning achievement, universalist liberalism hollowed out the symbolic and structural foundations that once sustained democratic order — dissolving asymmetry, lineage, and belonging in the name of abstract equality.
This essay traces how that dissolution led not to greater cohesion, but to fragmentation: a demos without mediation — save for the passport — a polity of ritualized grievance, and an ever-proliferating caste of entitled victims. From the collapse of the family as political substrate to the rise of identity as a weapon, it charts the internal contradiction that turned liberal democracy against itself.
The outcome is not a freer society — but a shattered one. This is the beginning of a trilogy on the implosion of symbolic cohesion and the emergence of postliberal alternatives.
Editorial Note
This essay continues our investigation into the tectonic structures of social viability, a line of analysis inaugurated in our trilogy on the fragmentation of the Western nation-state. There, we argued that open mass communication acts as a catalyst for the disintegration of symbolic and functional cohesion. This new series begins a parallel exploration of how liberal ideology, far from sustaining democratic order, actively undermines the very conditions that once made it possible. Today’s text reconstructs one such condition: the family as the pre-political nucleus of shared psychological belonging — and the liberal destruction of that nucleus. This exploration aims to uncover the tectonic breaklines that now undermine not just national identity, but the very possibility of collective coherence.
The Return of Difference: Haunting Liberalism and Shattering the Illusion of Belonging
The Disintegration of the Democratic Nation
I. Belonging Through Difference: The Original Architecture of the Democratic Idea
At its structural core, Western democracy once rested on the unspoken assumption that the traditional reproductive family — composed of a man and a woman — provided not only biological continuity, but also psychological homogeneity. This was the deep, unspoken grammar behind the political fiction of "We, the People," complemented by the equally unspoken assumption that men belonged to the same demos — defined either by shared interest (as in America) or by common tradition and culture (as in France or England).
The logic was simple: men would vote as fathers (or as future heads of families), and women would trust that those men — invested in the welfare of their wives and children — would make political decisions beneficial to all. The family, in this sense, was the anchoring unit of a shared horizon of belonging, in which differences in sex, age, and authority were not only acknowledged but functionally integrated.
Democracy, under these conditions, did not presuppose equality in the abstract, but rather co-belonging within a structure of asymmetrical roles. The subordination of children to parents, of the young to the old, of the female role to the male provider, formed a symbolic architecture that made political unity plausible. The political community was the projection of this more primordial structure of coordinated interdependence.
II. Two Forms of Democracy
A. Democracy of Belonging
What shattered this architecture was not democracy itself, but a specific mutation of it. The older form — the democracy of belonging — was rooted in shared lineage, symbolic asymmetry, and functional roles. It was not universal, but deeply exclusionary: participation was predicated on being part of a psychologically and culturally homogeneous group. This is exemplified in Athenian democracy, which extended political rights only to native male citizens — excluding women, slaves, and metics (resident foreigners). This exclusion was not accidental, but a structural recognition of the principle that political cohesion requires shared symbolic belonging — not merely as legal status, but as a psychological orientation, a common mental disposition anchored in symbolic forms — where men did not represent themselves as individuals, but functioned as proxies of the household and the lineage. The demos was never merely a mass of individuals, but a bounded community held together by a common form of life.
This form of democracy, grounded in symbolic closure, stands as the antithesis of the liberal project of open-ended universality. The liberal inversion of this model — universalist in scope and individualist in logic — marks not the fulfillment of democratic ideals, but their detachment from any viable substrate. Liberalism in its individualist, universalist form shattered the architecture of belonging.
B. Universal Democracy as Liberal Fantasy
The rupture came with liberalism in its universalist, individualist form — the idea of a democracy composed of abstract, autonomous individuals with equal political rights, detached from any inherited structure of belonging. This model of universal democracy rests on the fantasy that social cohesion can be sustained without shared lineage, hierarchy, or symbolic asymmetry. In this fantasy, democracy becomes exportable, permanent, and all-inclusive — a framework of rights detached from any structure. And yet, even in its most radical formulations, liberal democracy never fully escapes the paradox it tries to dissolve: some marker of inclusion must remain. Foreigners — the 'others' beyond the national passport — are still excluded. Thus, even the most universalist democratic regimes tacitly admit that belonging must have a boundary, even if that boundary is now administrative rather than symbolic. The very existence of citizenship requirements — however procedural — testifies to the buried truth that political cohesion cannot rest on the conventional abstraction of human equality alone.
Yet the convention of mere formal equality is a radical departure from the older, structurally embedded democracies that emerged from systems of belonging — including the paradigmatic example of Athenian democracy, which was never universal but strictly limited to those who shared blood, land, cult, and sex. The Western original nation-form inherited this model of restricted homogeneity, even as it claimed to move toward universality.
The liberal variant of universal democracy injected the dissolving agent: a belief in formal equality without structural integration. Quite the contrary, at its core lies the concept of negative liberty — the idea that freedom means the absence of interference by others, especially the state or any traditional authority. This notion of liberty defines the individual as autonomous by subtraction — freed from bonds, roles, and inherited obligations. It begins with the axiom of the abstract individual — free from hierarchy, family, lineage, or generational debt. Every person is supposedly equal, and thus interchangeable — a fiction that only makes sense by denying the very differences that made belonging possible. Sex, age, authority, kinship — all are flattened into a neutral space of rights and choices pertaining to abstract atoms lacking any real difference, thereby precluding all heterogeneity. It is democracy absorbed by liberal universalism that ultimately corrodes the very substrate of the nation.
Here lies the supreme irony: difference was once the basis of belonging. It was the very condition through which asymmetry generated cohesion. But liberalism, by disqualifying difference as a principle of order, inadvertently turned it into a principle of antagonism. That which once allowed for integration now returns — not as harmony, but as fracture. Difference, denied as structure, returns as nemesis.
III. Victimhood and the Proliferation of Fractures
What began as the liberal erasure of functional difference has now inverted into its opposite: an explosion of politicized difference, no longer integrative but divisive. The same liberal framework that once denied sex, age, and lineage as meaningful distinctions now promotes their return — yet not as foundations for belonging, but as emblems of exclusion, injury, and grievance. Difference, once a silent precondition of unity, is reconfigured as a weapon of disaggregation.
This inversion is not accidental. It follows a dialectical logic: the individual was first abstracted from all particularity in the name of universal equality; then, when that abstraction collapsed under the weight of real-world heterogeneity, difference re-emerged — not as a basis for belonging, but as a claim to victimhood. The denied structures of belonging returned not as community, but as fragments, each insisting on its unique pain, each rejecting mediation and asserting irreducible pride.
As we argued in the second essay of our earlier trilogy, this ideological destruction of belonging is catalyzed by something deep and enormously powerful: the advent of open mass communication. What mass media — and later digital networks — introduced was not simply a new means of expressing individual identity, but a mechanism for elevating difference itself to the status of moral absolute.
This is how the figure of the victim emerged as the political protagonist of modern liberal democracies. Victimhood, defined by a difference that demands compassion and recognition, displaced the older symbolic unity of the nation — demanding not integration but special, caste-like compensatory rights derived from suffering. But once unmoored, difference does not stabilize — it proliferates. What we face is not a minority asking for integration, but an endless procession of groups asserting exclusionary, revenge-seeking identities.
The first and deepest fracture is that between the sexes. Once the idea of the male as representative or head of the family collapses — once it becomes unacceptable for women to accept political mediation through men — the feminist rupture is inevitable. There is no longer a shared horizon between the sexes. They no longer "belong" to each other, either symbolically or functionally; in fact, they are locked in a deep — and now ideologically framed — historical antagonism.
The next fracture is intergenerational. Children no longer see themselves as part of a lineage or tradition. The principle of seniority is destroyed. The result is both symbolic and economic: older generations become obsolete, and the state must invent substitute structures like pensions to replace the vanished family bond with its traditional generational agreement. The new generations have no commitment to the older. But state structures are only technical bandages on a deeper disintegration. In a system where personal autonomy is sacred, the most authentic, unspoken — and almost unspeakable — desire of the young is for the old to disappear in "due time."
Thus, liberal democracy — far from harmonizing difference — becomes the vehicle through which real — now unmediated by any deep horizon of belonging — irreconcilable differences explode the political form itself. The demos becomes a battlefield of mutually exclusive claims, each demanding recognition and exclusive rights, none offering mediation. The castes of suffering victimhood were born.
This dialectical reversal was made possible only because universal democracy had already been achieved. Here lies the supreme irony: difference was once the structural basis of belonging. It enabled asymmetry to generate cohesion, embedding roles and hierarchies into a symbolic order. Liberalism, in its universalist thrust, dissolved these structuring differences to make room for abstract individuals within a democracy of equals. But once that universal democracy was achieved, the suppressed differences returned, now transformed into demands for recognition made possible by and amplified through the open visibility of media networks. What had once unified now divides. The difference that made belonging possible, once erased, re-emerged not as a foundation for integration, but as a moral right rooted in suffering. The erased bond returns as claim, the structure as grievance. Thus begins the slow inversion: from integrative asymmetry to fracturing victimhood, from silent lineage to the noisy entitlement of DEI castes. On the basis of open interactive communication in real time, the liberal abstraction births its own nemesis.
And we insist: the very openness of the democratic order, based on formal universal inclusion, created the conditions for heterogeneity-based identitarian disaggregation. In short: against the fantasy of equality, liberal democracy did not overcome difference — it detonated it.
IV. China and the Persistence of Structured Belonging
Contrast this with China. There, differences are structured, not denied. At the foundation of this model lies a radically different concept of liberty: not negative freedom — the absence of interference — but positive integration. Freedom in the Chinese context is not subtraction of bonds, but embeddedness in a meaningful structure of roles, obligations, and hierarchies. The individual is not imagined as autonomous by detachment, but as functional by belonging. The family remains a functional unit; generational hierarchy is honored; lineage is binding, and seniority remains a structuring principle. The state does not need to compensate for familial breakdown, because the family has not been ideologically or symbolically annihilated.
One Mexican political commentator, Macario Schettino, has recently begun to acknowledge the disintegration of the nation-form. A trained economist and political analyst, Schettino has noted that the Western nation no longer functions as a viable unit, and has suggested — perhaps in somewhat Rousseauian terms — the formation of smaller, more coherent groups. Whether these are envisioned as homogeneous in moral will (à la Rousseau) or merely functional, the deeper recognition is crucial: the nation cannot survive the liberal erosion of structural belonging.
There is a certain irony in this admission. Even liberal thinkers, long committed to the dream of universal democracy, may begin to sense that some form of structured belonging is indispensable. But they do not openly concede it. Rather, they are being slowly forced to shift — from the ideology of open-ended inclusion to the practical necessity of circumscribed homogeneity. The very idea of cohesive subgroups, once treated as archaic or exclusionary, begins to reappear as a pragmatic response to fragmentation. Difference, boundary, and hierarchy — once banished in theory — now return under duress, as functional necessities. The liberal fantasy cripples.
What we are witnessing is not the failure of democracy per se, but the collapse of the substrate that once made democratic integration possible. That substrate — the family, the lineage, the seniority hierarchy — was not a contingent feature. It was the tectonic foundation. And liberalism, in its quest for abstraction, has struck directly at that tectonic layer.
Epilog
We are no longer dealing with a crisis of institutions, nor with a failure of leadership, but with the collapse of the symbolic architectures that once made political order imaginable. This is not simply a cultural or ideological shift — it is a tectonic transformation in the grammar of belonging. Liberal democracy, in its universalist form, hollowed out the deep structures upon which collective identity once rested. It then discovered, too late, that without those structures, there is no people — only groups demanding to be seen, heard, and vindicated, unraveling into caste-like aggregates now called “tribes.”
The paradox is now complete. By sacralizing the individual and dissolving the symbolic order that integrated difference into a shared horizon, liberalism has unleashed the very forces it cannot contain. The postliberal condition is not a coherent doctrine, but the aftermath of this implosion: fragmented identities, ritualized grievance, and an administrative demos without mediation — a demos defined solely by the passport. The political has not vanished — it has become a stage for moral performance and symbolic and material revenge.
And yet, the outlines of an alternative begin to emerge. Not a return to past hierarchies, but the reactivation of structural belonging in new, post-symbolic configurations. The cyborgean path — grounded not in nostalgia, but in functionality and adaptive coherence — offers a glimpse of postliberal reconfiguration. This is not a moral hope, but a tectonic necessity: wherever symbolic cohesion dissolves, only functional structure — not sacred cultural essences inherited from the past — can preserve viability.
Coming Next
This essay is the first of a new trilogy exploring the destruction of structural belonging through the elevation of identity-based victimhood. In the next two pieces, we will examine how blackness (as a political identity) and Beauvoirian feminism (as the ontologization of female difference) have further deepened the fracture of the symbolic substrate of political unity.
The Postliberal Path is Cyborgean.