Are all fanatics the same?

Inspired by Dostoevsky, David Brooks imagines in his latest column that extremists on the American "alt-right" and their equivalents on the far left are fundamentally, or at least temperamentally, the same. Both are -- or both see themselves as -- "sick," "spiteful" and "unattractive." Their "rage is intertwined with psychological fragility" and their "anger at real wrongs is corrupted [by narcissistic] existential panic." Those "who fill the air with hate" were alike "raised without coherent moral frameworks" and "in that coddling way that protects you from every risk except real life." Always uncertain of their place in the world or the social order, yet assured that "you can be anything you want to be," they yearn for order based on "blunt simplicities" and "Manichean binaries." Inevitably drawn to politics, they "make everything political." The column goes on and on in the first person, aping the narration of Dostoevsky's underground man. Brooks's own narrative is centrist and shallow. It's also a conservative temperament of an old type, distrustful of all other "isms" and inclined to see "fanaticism" as a type unto itself that defines fanatics of all kinds more than their individual beliefs. It's also distrustful of "the political" or the tendency to politicize things presumably outside the realm of elections or legislation. From a perspective self-consciously distant from that politicizing tendency -- even though declaring anything outside politics is arguably an ultimate political act -- political fanaticism tends to blur into a spectral singularity, especially when you're trapped in a bipolarchy in which both major parties seem increasingly controlled by fanatics. From a different perspective, neither partisan nor centrist, the two factions Brooks abhors don't look so alike. You needn't believe that one is better than the other to recognize differences that remain arguably more important than the traits shared by "fanatics." Without underestimating anger on the alt-right, it still seems to me that those people are less angry than their counterparts in antifa or elsewhere on the far left. That may be for the simple reason that alt-right types now feel secure in a group identity while leftists as individuals remain in relative existential crisis. Whether that's so or not, I still work under the assumption that the 21st century American right takes a more amusedly fatalistic attitude toward life (i.e. "everything's a joke") than the perpetually-outraged part of the left. Maybe I simply see more trollishness than pure rage on the right based on what I look at, but whatever a rightist's mood there most likely remains a definitive difference in expectations between right and left grounded in the proverbial assumption, on the right, that the world doesn't owe you a living, and the left's insistence that a civilized (or "just") world actually does.  The right-wing opinions I encounter seem less driven by fear of the Other then by contempt for certain personality types regardless of ethnic or cultural origin. I don't want to suggest that there's no fear on the right -- economic and social insecurity fuels extremism across the board -- but I do think that fear is stronger, for whatever reason, on the left. There probably are ways to test these hypotheses, but my main point here is to suggest that it remains more useful to probe the differences between right and left, or between the  "alt" versions of each, than to dismiss them as a single psychological type, as Brooks does. Such thinking could lead people to think that both extremes can be purged from American life more easily than is probably the case.