Brian Cabana's recent essay in American Thinker offers a sharp diagnosis of a long-observed phenomenon: classical liberalism, with its noble emphasis on individual autonomy, equality, and the dismantling of arbitrary hierarchies, does not remain liberal for long, in centralised social structures. Once it becomes the dominant ethos in centralised mass societies, it inevitably mutates into managerialism/technocracy, a system in which unelected experts, bureaucrats, and "competent" professional classes wield ever-expanding authority over daily life. Far from liberating the individual, this new form of liberalism becomes deeply pathological: permissive on some moral questions, ruthlessly authoritarian on others, and always justified in the name of expertise.
Cabana's central insight is unflinching. Liberalism is inherently deconstructive. It excels at tearing down traditional social customs, religious norms, family structures, and organic hierarchies in pursuit of greater personal freedom and equality. But governance requires authority and hierarchy. Once the old sources of legitimate order — custom, religion, kinship, and inherited wisdom — have been delegitimised, liberalism finds itself without internal resources to justify any new structure of rule. Appeals to natural rights, social contracts, or popular sovereignty prove politically insufficient in practice.
What fills the vacuum? Managerial/technocratic liberalism, rule by technical experts, credentialed professionals, and administrative agencies. This is not an accidental drift; it is the only politically viable way for liberalism to maintain both its egalitarian rhetoric and its need for coercive order.
The Mechanism: Motive, Means, and Opportunity
Cabana explains the transition through a clear triad:
Motive: Once liberalism dismantles traditional authorities (on marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, community standards), a massive demand is created for replacement services. Who steps in? Therapists, counsellors, lawyers, social workers, diversity consultants, and public health experts. These salaried professionals have a natural class interest in expanding the scope of their authority.
Means: Experts possess something the broader population lacks specialised technical knowledge that can be laundered into political power. They infiltrate institutions (universities, NGOs, government agencies, foundations) and present their preferences as neutral, scientific necessities rather than ideological choices.
Opportunity: A symbiotic alliance forms with oligarchical interests — large foundations (Ford, Carnegie, MacArthur), corporations, and wealthy donors. The experts gain funding, institutional protection, and prestige; the oligarchs gain political cover, goodwill, and policies that often favour mobile capital while neutralising populist or traditionalist opposition.
The result is liberalism's characteristic schizophrenia. It remains permissive — even celebratory — on issues like drug liberalisation, unrestricted abortion, or sexual autonomy. Yet it turns fiercely authoritarian on speech, dissent, parental rights, or any challenge to expert consensus (think COVID policies, gender medicine via WPATH, or the now-discredited Disinformation Governance Board). Both impulses serve the same end: creating more agencies, more jobs, more clients dependent on the managerial class.
Pathological Outcomes
This mutation is pathological because it severs liberalism from its historical roots in individual rights and limited government. Classical liberals defended the individual against the state; managerial liberals use the state (and its expert apparatus) to reshape the individual and society according to progressive social projects.
Expertise itself becomes corrupted. Once technical authority is weaponised for political ends, neutrality collapses. Institutions that once commanded respect, medical bodies, universities, public health agencies, are revealed as captured. Gender clinics, "harm reduction" approaches to addiction and homelessness, campus speech codes, and internet censorship regimes all follow the same pattern: "trust the experts" until the experts are exposed as ideologues or rent-seekers.
Cabana aptly invokes the final scene of Animal Farm: the pigs (the expert managerial class) and the farmers (the oligarchs) sit down together, indistinguishable in their exercise of power. Liberalism, once the ideology of liberation, now serves as the rhetorical cover for a permanent negotiation over resources, status, and control between these two intertwined elites.
Supporting the Thesis: Evidence All Around
The pattern is unmistakable in 2026. Universities that once championed free inquiry now enforce DEI bureaucracies and viewpoint discrimination. Public health agencies that claimed scientific objectivity during the COVID plandemic later admitted to suppressing dissent for "social" reasons. Corporate and foundation funding flows overwhelmingly to progressive causes that expand managerial oversight while protecting elite economic interests.
When ordinary citizens push back, through elections, parental rights movements, or free-speech challenges, the response is rarely liberal tolerance. It is managerial: more regulation, more monitoring, more pathologising of dissent as "misinformation," "hate," or a public health threat.
This is not liberalism evolving; it is liberalism revealing its internal contradictions under pressure. When pure individual autonomy collides with the need for social order, the autonomy rhetoric is quietly dropped in favour of expert management. The individual is no longer the sovereign bearer of natural rights but a subject to be nudged, counselled, monitored, and — when necessary — coerced for the greater "equity" or "safety" defined by the credentialed class.
No Sweet Ending Without a Reckoning
Cabana's essay confirms what many have observed empirically: classical liberalism was always unstable once detached from the cultural and moral soil that gave it life. When push comes to shove, when real governance decisions must be made in a deconstructed society, it mutates into something pathological: managerialism dressed in the language of compassion, expertise, and progress.
The expert-oligarch alliance stabilises the system for a time, but at the cost of genuine liberty, accountability, and social trust. Citizens become clients. Debate becomes "disinformation." Tradition becomes prejudice. And liberalism, once a defence of the individual against power, becomes the ideological justification for ever-more intrusive power exercised by those who claim to know best.
If we want to arrest this drift, we must recognise that managerialism is not a bug in the liberal program, it is the predictable endpoint once liberalism succeeds in dismantling the pre-liberal sources of order. Restoring limited government and individual rights requires more than nostalgic appeals to classical liberalism. It demands a clear-eyed rejection of the expert class's claim to rule by technical necessity.
The mutation is well advanced. Whether the West can still reverse it remains one of the defining questions of our age.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/04/how_liberalism_inevitably_turns_to_managerialism.html