From Richard Hoftatder's Pulitizer Prize-winning Anti-Intellectualism In American Life (1962, Random House, p 135):
"It [ed- the political intelligence] is sensitive to nuances and sees things in degrees. It is essentially relativist and skeptical, but at the same time circumspect and humane."
"The fundamentalist mind will have nothing to do with all this: it is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities. It cannot find serious importance in what it believes to be trifling degrees of difference: Liberals support measures that are for all practical purposes socialisitc, and socialism is nothing more than a a variant of Communism, which, as everyone knows, is atheism. Whereas the distinctively political intelligence begins with the policial world and attempts to make an assessment of how far a given set of goals can in fact be realized in the face of a certain balance of opposing forces, the secularized fundamentalist mind begins with a definition of that which is absolutely right, and looks upon politics as an arena in which that right must be realized. It cannot think, for example, of the cold war as a question of mundane politics - that is to say, as a conflict between two systems of power that are compelled in some degree to accommodate each other in order to survive - but only as a clash of faiths. It is not concerned with the realities of power - with the fact, say, that the Soviets have the bomb - but with the spititual battle with the Communist, preferably the domestic Communist, whose reality does not consist in what he does, or even in the fact that he exists, but who represents, rather, and archetypal opponent in a spiriual wrestling match. He has not one whit less realty because the fundamentalists have never met him in the flesh."
I've been meaning to post this for a while, but was reminded of it today when my whole seminar basically trashed Hofstatder's view of the Progressive Era. Despite that, he is in the pantheon of great American historians.