How Liberalism Inevitably Turns to Managerialism |
Politics > Liberalism
How Liberalism Inevitably Turns to Managerialism
How liberalism loses any connection with its historical principles and comes exclusively to represent the perpetual exaltation of the expert classes and their sundry social projects.
Brian Cabana | April 18, 2026
Among the more curious developments in modern liberal orthodoxy is its increasingly schizophrenic disposition towards political authority. Liberals are infinitely permissive with what they deem to be matters of personal expression, such as drug use, abortion, and various sexual contrivances. Yet, at the same time, on other sets of issues, liberals have adopted stringently authoritarian attitudes, supporting without compunction such draconian measures as censorship bureaus, speech codes, election nullification, and invasive medical overreach.
What is interesting about both these developments is how liberals will justify both moral laxity and political repression by invoking expert authority. The Left largely grounded its support for medicalized gender-affirmation on the judgment of purported expert institutions like WPATH; they justified permissive “harm reduction” approaches to managing homelessness by citing organizations like Harm Reduction International. Meanwhile, on the authoritarian end of the ledger, the Left invoked authorities like the Disinformation Governance Board (run out of DHS) and the Stanford Internet Observatory to argue for flagrant state censorship. Whether the cause of the hour is of the libertine or authoritarian variety, the Left invariably justifies it by appeal to scientific or technical expertise.
These developments in liberal politics -- the schizophrenic lurching between permissiveness and authoritarianism, the endless exaltation of experts -- are rooted in a vulnerability inherent in liberalism itself, namely that liberalism is inherently deconstructive. It is a political formula for dismantling social customs and hierarchies in pursuit of ever greater individual autonomy and equality -- that is, in theory.
The problem for liberals is that this process only goes one way. Once Liberalism becomes the dominant social ethos, it discovers that it lacks the internal........