Also the idea that "commitment to the rule of law" should be a virtue assumes high trust. It's entirely rational not to be "committed to the rule of law" in a society where law enforcement faces less scrutiny or risk of consequences than those on the receiving end of the enforcement. It also ignores that laws can be unjust and defiance of unjust laws can be a political driving force - although I guess in this ideal society unjust laws would just be discovered by thinking really hard and agreeing that they're unjust.

The article also throws the term "democracy" around without ever defining it. "Freedom of association" implies a direct democracy, possibly allowing for delegates, but "democratic institutions" and "politicians" implies a representative democracy at which point the distinction between democracy and technocracy becomes less clear.

Lastly, the article is very much begging the question by idealizing the "disinterest truth seekers". This implies there is an underlying truth that is orthogonal to ideology and social norms. Even in the natural sciences this is hardly a given. Mathematics famously is the only science that can claim absolute correctness but such "truths" are only relevant within their respective systems, e.g. the obvious statement "1 + 1 = 2" is only true if we agree to submit ourselves to the underlying assumptions, many of which are ultimately arbitrary. Physics is probably a close second but the consensus on what might currently be the closest approximation of a model perfectly describing empirical reality is so complex that most applications instead use models that are known to be wrong but are simpler and ultimately good enough for the given purpose.

At this point in science it is functionally impossible for a single person to have a holistic understanding of any given field, let alone the renaissance man ideal of a holistic understanding of a broad range of fields. So all views of "truth" are ultimately filtered through biases (e.g. discarding information as "irrelevant" or "unrelated") and often layers of abstractions. Imagining that this alone can result in a functioning society is the ultimate folly of liberalism: the total blindness to its own ideology.

Ideology is not a flaw. Ideology is a lens through which we can understand society and a value system which informs us in how we want to progress as a society. If you don't take the time to build out a coherent ideology or at least a coherent value system - and understand it as such - you'll just be left chasing an inconsistent and often contradictory assortment of "virtues" and ad hoc preferences like those 85% of people who are not "politically engaged" (and arguably being politically engaged is neither necessary nor sufficient to having a coherent value system or else we wouldn't have the widespread problem of very vocal Lions Eating People's Faces Party voters).