> The whole nation was founded on the principle that individual liberty was the primary concern

Did you know that immediately after the Revolutionary War ended, and among the reasons the Continental Army never actually disbanded (as was the original plan), it was used to put down a tax revolt among Pennsylvanians who weren't interested in paying the new alcohol tax?

We have always forced people to cooperate with someone else's version of "the good." From their point of view, the distillers believed the federal government and PA state didn't have the right to levy that tax. They learned otherwise. Similarly, about a hundred years later, a whole half of the country would try to take their ball and go home on the entire constituted union. They learned otherwise. The coercion you imagine only came about in the '30s was always there; it's probably necessary to maintain the empire. We do, however, get a vote on what we're coerced into (and we did in the '30s also).

The moral justification for collective organization of the country is the old do not die starving cold deaths, children don't go hungry, and we're all better off if some are forced to put more in the till than they would of their own volition (including, ultimately, them; the ultra-wealthy also drive on public roads and use public sewage, and their air is just as clean as their neighbor's because the EPA told them they had to put a scrubber on their factory's smokestack).

Here's a secret about the US and the PRC... We and the PRC have the same goal. We're empires of over a hundred million souls and we instituted governments to provide for the common welfare. We have quite different ideas of how to get there, but ultimately? More similarity than difference and we basically always have, ever since we stole a country from a king. Anyone who tries to calve off a chunk of the country we stole to run as their own isolated compound (like our forefathers did) learns pretty quickly that their freedoms end not at the beginning of their neighbor's nose, but when the outflow from their pockets to the tax coffers dries up. It's always been that way, ever since Washington rode up in front of a hundred men to tell some whisky distillers what the score was now that the king was gone.

As technology has evolved, it's become practically more possible to centralize the federation, and we've generally found that to be useful to improve the common welfare (everything from the interstate rail line network to EPA rules).

> Given there is no higher authority to appeal to

... which is why I fall back to the law. It's the ultimate Chesterton's Fence... if someone wants to tear down, for example, the Department of Education, it's incumbent upon them to explain how our ancestors erred and how we improve the common welfare and strengthen the union by turning back the clock. Because we instituted the thing to solve a problem... Why does that problem not come back if we reverse the old decision?

(Incidentally, if you want to argue the counter on things like this, that's my recommendation to you: talk about how modern society differs so much from the society of the '30s that such-and-such government function is no longer needed because it's redundant or irrelevant. You're trying to roll back a clock, to argue we misstepped... Roll the clock forward instead, explain how, for example, the Equal Rights Act is no longer necessary because the animosities of old were cured.

Sadly, on this specific topic you will fail because the Proud Boys decided to show up and be the living, breathing, carb-eating counter-example. But that's the avenue of argumentation that has promise. Otherwise, you're forever fighting the question "The people in the past passed these laws for a reason... What dragon does the fence keep at bay, and why wouldn't it come back if we take the fence down?").