We want to make them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion

From The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling, published in 1950. A set of essays penned in the 1940s, many of them in that period of Allied victory over the totalitarian regimes of militarism (Japan), National Socialism (Germany), Marxism (Russia), and Fascism (Italy). Trilling was peering into the future - where would classical liberalism take us? Emphasis added.

He is not explicit but he seems to sense the full-blown emergence of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, addressing the legal impediments to African-American citizens in exercising their civil rights, women, immigrants, etc.

It is probable that at this time we are about to make great changes in our social system. The world is ripe for such changes and if they are not made in the direction of greater social liberality, the direction forward, they will almost of necessity be made in the direction backward, of a terrible social niggardliness. We all know which of those directions we want. But it is not enough to want it, not even enough to work for it we must want it and work for it with intelligence. Which means that we must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes. Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product o the free play of the moral imagination.

Classical liberalism had just successfully defended its existence against various forms of totalitarianism and yet Trilling could see that the human Will to Power still existed. He was attuned to the ever-present human desire to dominate and coerce others, even in countries steeped in the wisdom of the Age of Enlightenment.

His sensitivity was prescient. After the 1960's extension of all civil liberties to everyone it was if we erected a wall against the ever present tide of Will to Power. Those with a thirst for coercion were stymied, though only for a short while. When it became evident that equal rights did not equate to equal outcomes, the focus of the nattering Nietzscheans shifted from a desire for Justice to a desire for Social Justice.

Social Justice gave them a vast justification to arbitrarily and anarchically coerce everyone else under the virtue-signaling auspices of doing-good. Such is the existential threat to Classical Liberalism, it spawns the conditions that allows authoritarians to cover their evil with a mask of virtue.