Those are fine analogies that clarify your views. I think they present a meta-perspective, as I said, in that they don't enable us to reckon with the divide between liberals and conservatives.

You say that the workarounds "get us where we want to go." Yet I think you'd agree that liberals and conservatives might not want to go to the same place. They disagree about the ends, not just the means.

At least, that's my view, and my hypothesis in this series is that where conservatism takes us isn't consistent with where most conservatives say they want to go. Conservatism takes us to monarchy, plutocracy, tyranny, patriarchy, slavery, dominance hierarchy, and entrenched, grotesque social inequality. That's the systematic effect of conservative policies which indicates, let's say, the unconscious purpose of conservatism. But when talking consciously (or cynically) about where they want to go, conservatives speak only about God, divine commands, freedom, and skepticism about the utopian promises of secular progress.

In short, I don't see how your meta-perspective is inconsistent with my hypothesis. We're dealing with different levels of analysis here.

If you're saying that conservatives and liberals are just competing with different tools or workarounds to figure out how society should be, I'd say that that open-endedness and good will towards both sides misses the historic pattern. It's not all just blind trials and errors, but reactions to the duality between people and animals, and between humanism and animalism (social Darwinism).

I'm not sure I understand the last sentence in your second-last paragraph. We might disagree on whether we should be dualistic about people and animals, but I don't think that debate affects metaphysics. The duality would happen at the levels of biology, psychology, and sociology.

And we don't have to be dualists in Descartes' absolute sense, positing nature and supernature. We can be profoundly different from animals, and even anomalous, without being supernatural (requiring another metaphysical substance). This is property rather than substance dualism. We have certain attributes that animals lack. Or those differences could be mere matters of degree that add up to differences in kind, calling for the special sciences to fill in the explanatory gaps.