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Before NPR scandal, a warning about 'elite' liberals: compassion turns to coercion
...In his book "The Liberal Imagination," published in 1950, Trilling pointed to the "dangers which lie in our most generous wishes." Progressives, Trilling observed, believe that through the "rational direction of human life" they can alleviate misery. But the reformers, Trilling showed, are too often oblivious of the truth of their own motives.

In his 1947 novel "The Middle of the Journey," Trilling probes this hidden impulse in his portrayal of Gifford Maxim, a character modeled on his Columbia schoolmate and legendary Soviet spy-turned-anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers. "And in the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man," Maxim says. This hope tempts the progressive to embrace coercive policies in the name of social equity. "The more we talk of welfare, the crueler we become," Maxim says. "How can we possibly be guilty when we have in mind the welfare of others, and of so many others?"...

...Trilling shared Maxim's skepticism about progressive motives. "Some paradox of our nature leads us," Trilling wrote in "The Liberal Imagination," "when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."...

...The "ultimate threat to human freedom," Trilling wrote in an account of George Orwell, might well come from a "massive development of the social idealism of our democratic culture." Such idealism is dangerous because the idealists have disguised their deepest motives even from themselves. In his essay on Henry James's novel "The Princess Casamassima," Trilling described the willfulness of the progressive reformer "who takes license from his ideals for the unrestrained exercise of power." In today's ostensibly benign social policies, there is more than a whiff of the coercive "will" Trilling dreaded, the "will which masks itself in virtue."