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).
I've seen several people on Less Wrong recommend Mencius Moldbug's writings, and I've been curious about how he became so popular here. He's certainly an interesting thinker, but he's rather obscure and doesn't have any obvious connection to Less Wrong, so I'm wondering where this overlap in readership came from.
[EDIT by E.Y.: The answer is that he's not popular here. The 2012 LW annual survey showed 2.5% (30 of 1195 responses) identified as 'reactionary' or 'Moldbuggian'. To the extent this is greater than population average, it seems sufficiently explained by Moldbug having commented on the early Overcoming Bias econblog before LW forked from it, bringing with some of his own pre-existing audience. I cannot remember running across anyone talking about Moldbug on LW, at all, besides this post, in the last year or so. Since this page has now risen to the first page of Google results for Mencius Moldbug due to LW's high pagerank, and on at least one occasion sloppy / agenda-promoting journalists such as Klint Finley have found it convenient to pretend to an alternate reality (where Moldbug is popular on LW and Hacker News due to speaking out for angry entitled Silicon Valley elites, or something), a correction in the post seems deserved. See also the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (aka Yvain, LW's second-highest-karma user). --EY]