And tyrants. The full quote reads refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

As one small example, the libertarian obsession regarding personal liberty only works well if personal liberties of one person never come into conflict with the personal liberties of another.
One may have the right to pollute a water stream on his private property, but by exercising his personal liberty, he is also polluting the stream for everyone downstream from him.

Also, the amount of personal liberty one has depends a whole lot on how much of it he can afford to exercise. If the neighbors downstream from a polluter can’t afford to seek justice in court, their liberty to have access to clean water from the stream is zero.

Another example is ‘equal opportunity’. The conservative mantra is: equal opportunity, not equeal outcome. Let’s imagine life to be a race with everyone having the (equal) opportunity of lining up at the starting line. Does the man with two broken legs really have an equal opportunity of finishing the race? His equal opportunity gives him zero actual opportunity.

What needs to be discussed is what the proper compromises and off-sets are that will make abstract theories into meaningful guildelines for sharing a nation.

You say the left and right are both hypocrites. What is important, however, is that they have different visions of where the lines of compromise should be drawn. And that’s a difference of opinion, not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy creeps in during the process of debate and advocacy, but that’s simply due to the mechnics of how people interact.

Ideals are vitally important as guides. Ideals confilct, however, so it would be foolish to expect our many ideals to survive in a virginal state after the rough and tumble of going about the business of living.