Alan Wolfe’s Liberal

At Slate, a review of Alan Wolfe’s profile of the American liberal (new sense of the term) or, at least, a profile of how a liberal fancies himself.

It is wrong, therefore, Wolfe argues, to see the divide between liberals and conservatives as grounded in a difference in attitudes toward human nature. It is not, as Thomas Sowell has claimed, that liberals believe that people are naturally good while conservatives know that, alas, we are fundamentally bad. “The important question is not whether human nature is good or bad; it is whether human beings can do anything about it.” Since liberalism is convinced that our natures are up to be us—something made, not found—the answer here from the liberal will always be yes.

 Is it possible to take his categories and paraphrase the distinction between and liberal and conservative as a distinction between over- and under-realized eschatologies respectively?