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The John Birch Society was convinced Eisenhower was a communist mole. Not FDR, mind you. Not Truman. Eisenhower. Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about them in 1965...
“Pseudoconservativism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission … The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition … [He] sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world … cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.”–Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 1965.
Now we have Altemeyer's work on Authoritarians but the subjects haven't really changed that much.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
