Cultural liberalism is about personal responsibility

Noah Smith writes Cultural liberalism is about personal responsibility.

Social conservatives, in my experience, often tend to argue that the lower classes of society are not smart enough to handle personal responsibility. They seem to argue, in effect, that lower-class people are stuck at Piaget's "concrete operational stage" - thinking in terms of rigid rules — while upper-class people are able to move on to the more abstract "formal operational" stage. In other words, they don't trust the masses to do the right thing if given freedom from punishment.

Now, if that sounds like a straw man, well, good, because I am not a big fan of that idea, and I hope it's more rare than it seems. But I suspect you'll find at least hints and threads of this idea throughout the arguments of many social conservatives.

Emphasis Mine

Why they need us! is the cry of ruling classes throughout history. The rulers are there to protect us from ourselves.

This is why Communism requires a much greater personal and social development of the workers. We have to be confident and experienced enough to take on the awesome responsibility of running society for everybody's benefit.

Once we achieve that, we would have achieved full adulthood in all aspects of our lives.