Jim — I liked your post (despite its provenance). I think your point is one that I’ve shared for years. The liberty-as-means liberals (as you call them) believe that the state should nudge, guide, cajole, encourage, shape, and at times coerce citizens to do the right thing for their own good. Sometimes giving the indivdual autonomy (formerly known as liberty) is worthwhile. Of course, this impulse exists on the right as well. The philosophical and moral perspectives differ, but there are many on the right who, to one degree or another, want to be in the business of using the state to make the world better, too.

Often, that impulse drives conservatives to call for limiting or repealing the role of the state. But sometimes it doesn’t (as the revived debate over abstinence education shows). Much of the argument between these meliorists on the right and meliorists on the left boils down to how each side views traditional institutions and arrangements. The meliorists on the left tend to see traditional arrangements as hindrances to social betterment. The meliorists of the right tend to see such arrangements as bulwarks of social order and repositories of social and intellectual capital. Left meliorists think they’re smarter than the spontaneous order, right meliorists think the spontaneous order has much to teach us. Obviously, these are sweeping generalizations.

My own view is that the Right is intellectually healthier and more creative because its dogma remains unsettled (yes, I’ve written about this a zillion times). The Right is divided between those who are (in Irving Kristol’s formulation) anti-left and those who are anti-State. Those who believe that the government is bad because it’s working from leftist assumptions, and those who believe that the government is bad because it is the government. (Most conservatives share both outlooks to one extent or another, but usually fit more into one camp than the other. If you’re wholly in the government-is-bad camp you’re more properly a libertarian, but still on the right). There are those who believe that liberty is an end and those who believe that liberty is a means. For more than a half century now, modern conservatives have been debating and redebating the question of where to the draw the lines between freedom and order, liberty and virtue. And because that line continually needs to be redrawn given the evolution of attitudes, changes in technology, etc, conservative intellectuals (though not necessarily conservative activists, politicians and the like) are constantly revisiting first principles and philosophical assumptions or are at least capable of acknowledging the good faith of their philosophical opponents). I do not think you can say the same thing about liberals (again, as a wild generalization). What unites most, if not all, factions of the Left, from socialists to DLC moderates is a dogmatic acceptance that the government should do good when it can and where it can. Hence the debates on the left tend to be procedural, wonkish, and technical or rankly political. The Right has such arguments as well, of course. But they do not define and dominate political discussions the way they do on the left. And that’s because our dogma is still unsettled.