"Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not 'express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.' During the 1950s and '60s,liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to 'the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.'"

Gerard Alexander looks at how liberals see conservatives.  When I read pieces like this I am always taken back to my college days.  Reagan had just "survived" the economic recession and was preparing to blow up the world.  My professors reacted to conservative views with attitudes ranging from puzzlement to disgust.  In my Capitalism Versus Socialism class the socialist viewpoint was ably represented by a former SDSer; the capitalist viewpoint was butchered by a professor with views barely to the right of the socialist prof.  It wasn't that they couldn't understand conservatism; they had no interest.

Thanks, NLT.