The Basis of Left and Right, Part 2

Steven Hayward's series continues, at Power Line, "THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 2: (HUMAN) NATURE, CONVENTION, AND LIBERTY":

The left-right divide begins to become more comprehensible when differing understandings of individual liberty and its political postulates are probed further. The starting point of liberalism offered here (individuals should be free to pursue their self-chosen purposes) leads liberals to challenge conventions that constrain individual autonomy—to “question authority” in the popular graffiti. The logical consequence of the imperative to expand the domain of individual autonomy naturally compels liberalism to be reformist, to embrace progress as the essential process to accomplish reform, and to employ reason to guide the progressive reform process. Above all, the imperative of individual autonomy necessarily places the principle of equality at the center of liberal thought. Conventional social structures that maintain artificial or arbitrary inequalities between individuals attract the most ire from reform liberalism, because such inequalities constrain or reduce the sum total of individual self-fulfillment across society. These four postulates of liberalism find their apotheosis in the impressively argued synthesis of John Rawls.

I wrote previously on the series here. It's going to take a bit more development to resolve some of the tensions I discussed there, although by mentioning equality Hayward is getting closer to the true nature of today's left.