Liberalism: The Great Anti-Tradition is a review of Mark T. Mitchell's The Limits of Liberalism: Tradition, Individualism, and the Crisis of Freedom and captures well liberalism paradoxical nature.

...Tradition is one way, we are told, that conservatives differ from liberals. Conservatives wish to conserve something; liberals, supposedly, do not. Indeed, liberalism is the great anti-tradition. But too often conservatives are left to mount only an attenuated defense of tradition; they seek to show liberals that some practice or tradition is in accord with “reason” and therefore sensible to retain, or that submitting to a tradition is more useful or advantageous than not....

...Kirk distinguished between tradition and ideology. “Individualism” or “democracy” in the abstract, he thought, could not form a tradition. Although Kirk’s rejection of ideology is controversial in some conservative circles, in general he meant an overarching system that purported to give answers to all earthly problems, typically imposed by a self-selected political elite. Traditions, in contrast, “are not abstractions; they are particular beliefs and customs closely related to private life and faith....

...We are, in George Scialabba’s words, “situated beings” living in a particular place and time with family and economic circumstances that shape us. Even when we are thrust into an unfamiliar situation, we take our traditions with us and seek to recover them, or to adapt them, in order that we may retain them.

...First wave liberalism, because it relied (despite its explicit claims) on resources rooted in tradition, entailed a general agreement about substantive goods, including some notion of the good life, both individually and corporately. Second wave liberalism is characterized by an increasingly explicit and energetic reaction of any claim to a universal, substantive good. What matters in second wave liberalism is merely a procedural framework that creates the maximal space for individuals to determine their own good.

And because there are no just limits to liberal autonomy, second-wave liberalism furthers what Mitchell calls cosmopolitanism, “the ideal of the autonomous chooser combined with a cosmopolitan impulse that seeks to eradicate differences, even as it celebrates the unconstrained choices of individuals.”....

...We are tradition-minded beings, despite the Enlightenment delusion, and our rationality is tied up with our historical and cultural situations....

...As Mitchell explains, there was always within liberalism—in its first or second phases—an illiberalism, which is itself a tradition. This illiberal liberalism has developed even as it was throwing off older traditions in the name of liberation. The question is what to do with the liberal tradition that has already developed. This is made more complicated by the very fact that we are swimming in that liberal tradition....

...Liberalism, in Rousseau’s phrase, will force us to be free. We can choose whatever we want except that which questions liberalism. And that means, as we have seen, that contemporary liberalism is very comfortable with punitive measures against those actors (Christian bakers, for example) who choose goods contrary to it. Liberalism has its liturgical calendar and its eschatology, its saints and demons, and it has developed customs and traditions from this that are recognizable lineaments of a kind of tradition. Liberalism may have rejected traditional authorities of church and state, but it has put other authorities in their place. The conservative lament that liberalism is only “procedural” in its rejection of tradition is incorrect, largely for the reasons Mitchell adumbrates.