Liberalism and the Desert of the Real
On the Collapse of Intermediate Institutions and the Rise of the Technocratic State
The promise of liberalism stood to liberate man from all bonds that he did not choose.1 The triumph of liberalism was the day when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, to quote Aragorn from before the Black Gate2. The result: the destruction of the basic or intermediate social bodies (cuerpos intermedios) - the family, the municipality, the county, the region, the country, the country; the destruction of the basic or intermediate social bodies - family, municipality, county, region, federation, university, church, guild, aristocracy and army - until the individual and the State are left standing face to face on the apocalyptic horizon of a social desert.3 Man stands alone deracinated, nakedfacing the managerial bureaucracy and the most sophisticated of corporations.
Why does this system that seeks to liberate man from the social tyranny 4 eventually lead to restrictions of man´s liberty to act? As the great Spanish statesman Juan Donoso Cortes stated in his famous speech Sobre la dictatura ,5 once the level of religious authority sinks, the level of political repression rises, for it must. If man no longer knows in his heart that “Thou shallt not steal” a great number of laws must be written and policemen deployed to prevent him from doing so. A society without internal discipline must be externally policed.
Liberalism, in its self-congratulatory narrative, proclaims the State to be neutral—abstaining from worldview, religion, or philosophy. But such neutrality is a fiction. The very act of defining public order, rights, and permissible speech presupposes a philosophy. In reality, the liberal state enforces its own dogma: materialism, utilitarianism, proceduralism, and individual autonomy elevated to the status of sacred idols. The supposed neutrality becomes a disguised hostility toward every older loyalty and creed.
The outcome is not a free citizenry, but a bureaucratised citizenry regulated in its habits, speech, and customs. In a secularised state, schools shy away from instructing morality except in the abstract. Public life must suppress religious or traditional expressions. What once relied on social trust and shared conscience now requires legislation and surveillance. Rather than referring to an implied moral consensus, the State must now instruct users not to microwave their pets.6
In parliamentary democracy, the law-giving branch multiplies laws by design. Each Member of Parliament, to prove his relevance, must either create legislation or oppose that of his rivals. To return to his constituency empty-handed is to appear idle. Success lies in proposing new laws or becoming known as the fiercest opponent of another’s proposal. But even such opposition requires draft legislation to exist. Almost no political incentive exists to repeal, revise, or prune. Over time, the thicket grows—law upon law, clause upon clause—while the living space of liberty withers.
This is not an accident but a structural feature. Not a bug, but a feature. Liberalism unleashes the logic of legislative inflation. New rights beget new responsibilities, which beget new enforcement regimes. In the name of defending freedom, new forms of coercion proliferate.
There exist little or few incentives for legislative assemblies in parliamentary democracies to go through an inventory of passed laws and scrap the obsolete ones. As a result, the volume of legislative overregulation grows ever larger and the space of liberty shrinks with the progress of time.
Meanwhile, the moral authority of law decays. Laws are passed in response to media outcry or electoral expediency. They are now longer timeless, they are ad hoc7. Jurisprudence gives way to hysteria. The legislative process becomes a reaction to the last outrage, not a reflection on the permanent things. The law ceases to teach and begins to confuse. People lose respect for what they do not understand.
More profoundly, as classical liberty—freedom to pursue the good—is replaced by license—freedom to do anything—the moral ecology collapses. A people once guided by faith, tradition, and honour must now be managed by the State. Pornography, narcotics, speech codes: all are permitted in the name of liberty and then surveilled in the name of safety. The State permits the disease and sells the cure. A good reason for more legislative overregulation.
Technological advancement has enabled this new Leviathan. Bureaucracies and algorithms now extend the reach of the State into private and even subconscious life. Surveillance, predictive policing, digital identity systems—all have turned the modern liberal state into a digital panopticon. Here, the eye does not sleep, and the net never lifts.
The definition of liberty shifts once more. Now it means not freedom to pursue virtue but freedom from discomfort, from harm, from offense. Safety becomes the summum bonum. In the name of safety, anything can be justified: lockdowns, censors, speech tribunals. And the people beg for more.
This is the final irony. Liberalism, which began as a revolt against hierarchy, ends by constructing the most total hierarchy of all: the technocratic-bureaucratic superstate. A pyramid without temples, administered by screens.
Donoso Cortés foresaw this. When theology retreats, ideology advances.8 The sacred order cannot simply disappear—it must be replaced. And it is replaced by pseudo-religions: equality, progress, climate, gender. Each with its own liturgy, heresies, and inquisitions.With its cancel culture.
And yet, there is hope. The task is not to return in nostalgia but to rebuild in fidelity. To recover the soil in which liberty once grew. That means reviving cuerpos intermedios: the family, the town, the guild, the parish. It means strengthening the things that give shape to freedom.
The principle of subsidiarity must return: what can be done locally must not be claimed by the central state. Law must be rooted once more in natural law—in the truth about man, not the fashions of the hour. Communities must relearn what it means to live in order, not merely under management.
Then, and only then, can liberty be restored. Not the liberty of unbounded whim, but the liberty to live well, in community, under truth. This is the long task of restoration. Not a revolution, but a re-rooting. Not a new ideology, but the recovery of civilisation and tradition.
Patrick DENEEN, Why Liberalism Failed
Aragorn’s speech in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, dir. Peter Jackson (2003), paraphrased from Tolkien’s original line: “I do not fear death. But I do fear a cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them, and all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire.”
Francisco ELIAS DE TEJADA y SPINOLA et al. : ¿Que es el Carlismo?, point 53
John Stuart MILL, On Liberty
Juan DONOSO CORTES: On Dictatorship See article on Substack
Referencing a widely known legal anecdote in the United States: several microwave oven instruction manuals included warnings not to dry pets in the device, a result of litigious overreach and the decline of assumed moral common sense.
What great contrast with the Syriac civilisation and the Muslim sharia, where are all laws are timeless delivered from divine authority.
See Carl SCHMITT, Political Theology (1922): “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”