The Great Awokening almost certainly represented an authoritarian turn by the Left, ‘a spreading social, cultural, and ideological conformism . . . this relentless drive for conformism, which constantly works to extinguish the illiberal’.11 Progressivism can never rest, there must always be a new battle to be fought, or to use that dreaded phrase, ‘there is still much work to do’. Yet just as this political activism was intensifying, new academic research began to overturn the long-held belief that conservatism correlated with authoritarianism.
