How Liberalism Inevitably Turns to Managerialism

American Thinker 

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 resources to construct and legitimate any social hierarchy. This creates problems for the exercise of governance, which is inherently hierarchical and authoritarian. (For evidence of this, the next time one is pulled over, one should deny the authority of the officer on the scene on the grounds of the inherent equality of all human beings; see what happens.)

In light of this, liberals have striven, over centuries, to devise some system that can justify hierarchical governance structures within their egalitarian ethos, postulating such schemes as Social Contract theory, Proprietorial Libertarianism, the Veil of Ignorance, Popular Sovereignty, and countless others. Historically, the only such systems that have proven politically viable are those ostensibly grounded in ‘technical expertise,’ that is to say, managerial liberalism.

The political viability of managerial liberalism has nothing to do with the inherent justness or validity of this solution. On the contrary, institutions of technical or professional authority, once leveraged for political authority, immediately become compromised. Their ‘expert opinions’ quickly degenerate into flagrantly pretextual covers for purely political machinations. Note that the various institutions cited at the outset, WPATH, the Disinformation Governance Board, and so forth, have since collapsed in a heap from their own corruption.

Liberalism tends towards managerialism not out of any theoretical or moral justification, but out of a confluence of motive, means, and opportunity. Regarding motive, experts and technicians are salary men and government workers, meaning their immediate interests are generally aligned with those of wage-earners and in conflict with the interests of capitalist profit-takers. Further, expert classes in many ways are in direct competition with the cultural and religious authorities that liberals seek to dismantle, as the decline of these authorities creates cultural confusion, which in turn generates more demand for their expert services. For example, a society in which marriage is not strictly regulated by religious and cultural prescriptions will greatly require the services of sundry counselors, therapists, lawyers, and coaches to take up the slack.

One sees how liberalism and managerialism perfectly complement each other. Liberal ideology eviscerates the cultural norms and traditional institutions that sustain social order, leaving these cultural functions to be performed by an emergent class of technical experts. In turn, this expert class provides the liberals with an inherited authority structure -- an institutional hierarchy built on technical expertise -- that liberal ideology cannot generate on its own. Managerial liberalism, by merging these forces, comes to possess both the ideological vision and the formal authority structure required to build a viable state.

It is the expert class’s surreptitious laundering of technical authority into the domain of political authority that provides liberals with the means to enact their ideology within a concrete political and legal structure. The expert class provides liberals with a numerous, highly competent, and class-conscious constituency that can form an organized counter-elite to vie for political power. Further, experts can insinuate themselves into key cultural institutions and leverage them for political ends. No other ‘liberal-leaning’ cohort has this capacity to construct and maintain hierarchical authority-bearing institutions. The ‘working class’ lacks the built-in organizational hierarchy (unions are easier to bust than to build); cultural vanguards lack the numbers; the underclass lacks the competence and discipline. One sees these peripheral left-factions at the margins of liberal political coalitions, struggling fruitlessly to wrest some control from the expert class, but unable to exert serious influence.

Expert classes enjoy one more critical asset, in that competing elites will often afford expert classes the opportunity to join them in a power-sharing arrangement. Unlike the working class, whose interests directly oppose those of capitalists, expert classes exist in a relation of friendly antagonism with oligarchical interests. The typical liberal expert does not want to topple the MacArthur or Ford Foundations, as a Classical Marxist might; he will be seeking a MacArthur Grant or a Ford Fellowship to elevate his professional standing.

A commercial oligarchy thus easily establishes a symbiotic relationship with liberal managerialism. Concentrated capital pools -- the Ford and Carnegie Foundations, the Harvard Endowment ad infinitum -- sponsor cadres of experts to buy themselves goodwill and political protection (and in particular to push aside those pesky liberal contingents that are less friendly to big business). In return, the oligarchy sets up all sorts of sinecures and endowments to multiply and remunerate the ranks of the expert class. In time, this arrangement stabilizes; ‘liberal politics’ becomes a perpetual negotiation as to how the pie is sliced between Foundation guarantor and Foundation guarantee, with both sides acknowledging the value of the other’s role in the underlying political game.

It is at this point where liberalism loses any semblance of connection with its historical ideological principles and comes exclusively to represent the perpetual exaltation of the expert classes and their sundry social projects. It eventually becomes irrelevant whether any of these projects is in any way consistent with liberal ideology as traditionally understood. One bureaucrat could promote something as permissive as the provision of public accommodations for heroin use; another could promote measures as oppressive as the establishment of a giant censorship bureaucracy. Both present as ‘liberal’ endeavors simply by virtue of enabling the creation of more government agencies, sinecures, and jobs. Meanwhile these selfsame experts take great care not to look into the structural inequality inherent in their ownpositions of authority, nor to render the slightest scrutiny upon the oligarchy that sponsors them. We have arrived at the final scene of Animal Farm, where the Pigs and the Farmers are sitting across the table, playing cards, and unable to distinguish one from the other.