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Well, starting from communists, for them it is about power. It's not only about power, but the classic communist revolution must result in the dictatorship of the proletariat. No setup where it's not the case can be recognized by a communist as legitimate, and any such setup must be overthrown. Now, when they have the power, there's still much work to be done, and that's where communists go Judean People's Front vs. People's Front of Judea and splinter into various *isms. But that's after the power has been captured.
Conservatives are probably the closest ones to your description - they need power to prevent people from doing bad things and to force them to do good things. As long as that's what is happening, the application of power is unnecessary.
The classical liberals and libertarians, on the other hand, are probably the farthest, because they reject application of power to force people to behave in certain ways, unless that behavior comes into immediate conflict with a narrow set of natural rights (such as murder, bodily harm, theft of property, etc.). Applying power just to make sure people don't do something you think is not good, even if it does not violate their rights, is contrary to this mindset. Here, the power is to be used as little as it is possible to keep the whole system from collapsing into chaos (anarchists would claim this minimum is actually zero).
Now modern liberals, they are somewhat similar to conservatives towards application of power, but with couple important twists. First, good things are never enough - the standards evolve and change constantly, and the continuous application of power is necessary to keep up, what was perfectly good a year ago, is an appalling bigotry today. Second, there's a class of natural standard-setters, who define and re-define these constantly evolving and changing standards, and those people are the only legitimate candidates for holding power (not all of them will hold power, but all power holding should be done by them only, or it is illegitimate and should be resisted by any means). Also, since their vision involves forcible redistribution of resources from people who have them to people who "deserve" them (standard-setters identify those) but don't have them, this again requires constant application of power. So while the power is not the end in itself, their vision necessitates constant control and exercise of power.
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