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It's supposed to be the right who's into moralizing and the left who's overly permissive and tolerant. You can see how quickly this changes when the political activity of a large fraction of this country becomes more and more plainly indefensible--everything is up for debate,
except the idea that people's positions in that debate are subject to moral assessment. This is too far, because when things are as clear as the light of day, what the right needs to do is defend the idea that they're worth engaging and compromising with.
You don't have to be a communitarian to know that being able to live in a free society with others requires some basic amount of moral character among people. Liberalism shouldn't require just pretending that that condition is met at all costs, we should he honest about reality
Also you can see these attempts to dodge moral accountability for the right in how their defenders engage. The claim is that a large number of Americans have political views which are expressive of characters which (in such large numbers) threaten equal freedom in society. I
It would be absurd to deny that *if* so many people have characters like that, then we can't treat it like reasonable disagreement of ideas. The question, then, is whether I'm right that so many people have a character like that, or if I'm just exaggerating. That's what
people who disagree with me should focus on. But they don't do this--rather, they say I'm tribalistic, I don't believe in free exchange of ideas, don't believe in liberal virtues of tolerance, stuff like that. Rather than address the relevant moral question, they try to
assimilate all views together and speak at a more abstract level in order to make ethical reasoning about politics impossible.
