In 1954, Richard Hofstadter, the eminent American historian of modern conservatism, asked a provocative question about his era’s assault on progressive and left-wing ideals, known as McCarthyism: Where did this extremism come from?
He argued in a celebrated essay that even the prosperous, post-Second World War United States was not immune to the radicalism of authoritarian populism. The so-called Red Scare of the 1950s was “simply the old ultra-conservatism and the old isolationism heightened by the extraordinary pressures of the contemporary world.”
