Solutions are also subject to the same hypocrisy. It doesn't matter whether a solution actually solves what it's supposed to solve; all that matters is that it makes the proposer look like she/he really cares. Hence Obamacare, which liberals trumpet as being the final solution to health care because it makes them look like they really do care about the least among us, despite the fact that it will beggar the poor and the middle class and enrich liberals and the very insurance company executives whom liberals love to claim they hate.
Liberalism is the politics of emoting as opposed to conservatism's politics of achieving.
When progressives get their "yes we can" on, conservatives tend to rain on their parade with things like math and logic. This pisses progressives off, because financial reality has no place in their progressive dreamthink of a society. They hate right-winger financial realists because they kill their collective feel-good buzz.
That doesn't mean however that flight-of-fancy politics are the sole property of one side of the political spectrum. The very term "conservative" identifies the issue with right-wing politics: the idea that things can be preserved unchanged in a world where the only constant is change. In essence, just as progressives tilt imaginary lances at real giants, conservatives tend to fight real giants with wooden swords. Not everything that can be imagined be achieved, and nothing ever remains unchanged.
Insofar as solutions are concerned, progressives do not place as much weight on the actual solution of a problem as they do the appearance of the desire to solve it, which is somewhat what Greenfield says here. The blame for failure is assigned to those who oppose the plans, so it's never the actual plan that fails, it's always the non-adherence to the progressive groupthink of a portion of the population that's at fault.
Conservatives on the other hand, walk a weird road where the only way to realize the ideology's social agenda, is to engage the force of government thus violating the Jeffersonian ideals of small government and limited regulations, the very tenets of conservatism.