In Chris Mooney's book "The Republican Brain" he makes a good case based on recent studies for why we should think of the totalitarianism of the former USSR as a right wing phenomenon. [...] Conservative personalities then acclimate themselves to the resulting bureaucracy and seek to freeze it in place. Then, being authoritarians, they accumulate power and use it as authoritarians always do.

It'd be hard for me to overstate my skepticism for the genre of popular political science books charging that their authors' enemies are innately evil. I haven't read Mooney's book, though I have read quite a few articles with a similar thesis; if you're presenting his analysis accurately, though, it seems pretty tortured.

Mao was central to his revolution from its inception, and if you've read anything of his it's obvious that he was a true believer. The democides he's been charged with may have worked as consolidations of power, but they certainly weren't attempts to minimize social or political change; indeed, most of the deaths during the Great Leap Forward can be laid at the feet of novel but poorly implemented agricultural organization. (This may also be true for the Holodomor and other instances of mass famine in the Soviet Union.) Stalin's a more ambiguous case; many of his worst excesses do seem to have served a personal power grab, and he was a relatively minor figure within Lenin's initial party organization, but if anything he seems too ambitious to be branded a Marxist conservative. His purges don't fit well with a desire to safeguard the Leninist bureaucracy; on the contrary, they pretty much destroyed it. He was of course an authoritarian in the sense of seeking to maximize personal and state power, but the "Marxist conservative" label seems to fit Khrushchev and others of his generation much better.

In any case, if we're using "liberal" and "conservative" strictly to gauge desire for social change, then by the same token we have to decouple it from authoritarianism or adherence to positions generally thought of as right-wing. Indeed, in this narrow sense Hitler, Mussolini, and others (though perhaps not Franco) might be considered liberals: fascist (in the grandparent's sense) ideology is quite big on cultural traditionalism, but even more central is its concept of social transformation based on extreme nationalism, shared political goals, and economic corporatism. The nostalgia in its rhetoric has to be understood in that context (and, in Hitler's case, in the context of a sense of national humiliation following WWI).

Liberal means "novelty seeking". So what you have in human personalities are those who seek to minimize change and those who seek to maximize it.

You might be interested in these two articles. Note that Moldbug's writing is cited as an example of insight porn in the comments.

The "Dark Enlightenment" crowd differs from the Conservative crowd in that the former are more likely to be maladapted people wanting radical change in society and novelty in their ideas while the latter are well adjusted people who dislike change since it is cognitively expensive to deal with. Here is a left wing take on the difference. I think this is a key problem of his readers since it biases them towards such ideas (this includes me naturally). Arguably Marxism had a boosted appeal in the middle of the 20th century among Western intellectual elites because of similar reasons.

Moldbug himself probably only enjoys demolishing Universalism as much as he does because his grandparents where Communists, parents where Liberals and he moved in the university crowd in California, so the ideas he comes up with and the material he seeks out differ radically from what he was immersed in as a child, teenager and probably even now.