"Not only is the entire right-wing movement infused at the mass level with the fundamentalist style of mind, but the place in its ranks of fundamentalist preachers, ex-preachers, and sons of preachers is so prominent as to underline the mutual congeniality of thought."
"Today" is a reasonable answer but in fact it was written over 40 years ago by Richard Hofstadter in "Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited - 1965." This and other essays have been reprinted in THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS and other Essays and I highly recommend reading Part 1 if you want a fuller understanding of where our current wingnuts are coming from.
Because of Hofstadter, Altemeyer, Block, other researchers and even Hayek, I am less inclined now to see modern American conservatism as a coherent ideology and more inclined to see it as a personality trait centered on fearfulness. The explicit ideological commitments will vary with the historical period (Communism in the 1950s, Jihadists in the 2000s) but the style of thinking remains the same.
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