I like and agree with what Freedom Beyond Liberalism has to say about "mediating institutions."
...I don’t believe nations emerge out of a vacuum. Ideas are enmeshed in cultural ecosystems. If America is stretched beyond its limits, it runs the risk of rejecting the constraints that made its propositional ideals possible. As the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, reflecting on America’s uniquely religious landscape, “Despotism can do without faith, but freedom cannot.”
What I think Tocqueville means is that mediating institutions (family, church, or any voluntary association) must stand as meaning-giving buffers between an all-consuming libertarianism and an all-consuming state. Liberty’s loss is on the horizon when a society stresses only individual meaning or government enacting a utopian vision. Pope Benedict XVI warned against “the dictatorship of relativism.”
Societies need authorities that anchor their foundations beyond mere convention, raw majoritarianism, expressive individualism, and state totalitarianism....