They have their coalition politics, too. Egalitarian liberalism needs no explanation and has, in fact, always been the strongest political attraction of liberalism. All attacks on status conservatism gain credence whenever done from the stance of the value of equality. Along with liberty and morality on the conservative side, equality was also part of the trinity of values animating the Framers and the American Revolution. Welfare liberalism ultimately derived from the statist philosophy of a progressivism articulated most particularly by Woodrow Wilson.
Welfare liberalism is based on a materialist view of human nature.
It holds that the happiness and dignity of each human is determined by his material environment. That is why welfare liberals truly believe they are assisting people when they create a regime of grinding dependency on the government. In contrast, libertarians focus on the independent responsibility of the individual while social conservatism looks at the fundamental moral dignity of each individual. But autonomy liberalism is not, as some think, merely the liberal analog of rights conservatism. But now I have come to realize that autonomy liberalism and genuine libertarianism are polar opposites, for they are based on antithetical notions of what the human person is.