Mid-century liberal commentators like Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter treated the conservatives of their era as fringe holdovers from an earlier time, like Japanese soldiers still fighting the Second World War in island caves. This “Radical Right,” as they called it, needed to be explained psychologically more than ideologically, as the product of “authoritarian personalities.” They even referred to this right as “pseudo-conservative,” borrowing from Theodor Adorno—not truly conservative in the sense of wanting to preserve institutions and traditions, but revolutionary in its hostility to
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