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]
"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"
It is obvious you have not read it because he makes no such claim nor have I. In fact he ends the book with a new found respect for conservatives. Loyalty, personal responsibility, being willing to set aside one's own desires for the good of the group are all admirable qualities. I myself do not despise conservatives in themselves. I do despise the hucksters and grifters who promote pseudoscience and conspiracy theories in order to enrich themselves. Those people find a significant percentage of the population are easily manipulated by preying on their fears and prejudices. That percentage is over represented by conservative personality types and people with that kind of temperament tend to find political conservatism more to their liking. I have met Democrats with conservative personalities but not many. Civil Rights legislation in the 60's was passed primarily by Republicans with liberal personalities. The reactionary types were in the Democratic Party
Conservatives are not innately evil. No one is. All people are susceptible to certain cognitive biases. Some people more than others. Some other people have found they can manipulate them to their advantage. It is easy to do, you trigger the fear response, as a result one's rational centers literally shut down and areas of the brain associated with survival are activated.
"if we're using "liberal" and "conservative" strictly to gauge desire for social change"
No, that's not how it is used. Conservative means "resistant to change" and Liberal means "novelty seeking". Political conservatives need not all be authoritarians but virtually all authoritarians would self select for conservative political organizations.
"Indeed, in this narrow sense Hitler, Mussolini, and others (though perhaps not Franco) might be considered liberals"
That's absurd. Liberalism is not defined as a desire for social change. The authoritarian or conservative mindset would also seek social change because they wish to return to what they perceive as a traditional model for society.
Once they have power, yes. In order to seize power, they need to appeal to "novelty seeking" liberals in order to destroy the existing order, especially all those annoying checks and balances designed to keep any one person from acquiring power.