I thought this was a great email. Lots of stuff to chew on:

Dear Jonah –
I finished Liberal Fascism about a week ago, and wanted to thank you for
writing such an excellent book. Congratulations on reaching the top of the
Times’ Best-Seller list. Your success is well-deserved, and I hope for a
long and culturally influential stay at the top of the charts.
LF has led me to crack open a few books that have lingered on my shelf since
college. One of these is The German Dictatorship by K. D. Bracher (I
scanned the notes and index to see if you referenced this work by chance,
but didn’t see it listed). Early on, Bracher delineates the two basic
historiographical camps regarding Nazism – the “it’s in Germany’s blood”
camp, and the “it was in the European air” camp, the former finding the
sources of National Socialism in Prussian militarism and imperialism, the
latter locating the sources in the forces unleashed by the French
Revolution. I found three paragraphs devoted to the European background to
be of great interest, and wanted to see if you had any thoughts on them
(apologies for the length, and for any misspellings):
“According to this view, the totalitarian movements are the children of the age of democracy, having grown out of and being part of the problems and distortions of popular democracy; in this way, they differ from the prerevolutionary and predemocratic autocracy of absolutism. The political awakening of the populace is the decisive factor in this development. Since then, the face of dictatorship has also changed. It employs different methods and enhances its chances of winning universal, total control by utilizing, manipulating, and distorting the dynamic ideas of freedom and brotherhood of the democratic movement; it lays claim to the will and the sovereignty of the people as the basis for political rule; it proclaims itself the executor of history, of historical necessity; it stresses the higher legitimacy of its rule and clothes its seizure of power iin pseudo-legal garb; it hides and intensifies dictatorial rule behind the screen of pseudo-democratically, pseudo-plebiscitarian-controlled elections and mass meetings, of acclamation and propaganda; it poses as the true, total democracy which will, if necessary, force happiness on its citizens. The absolutism of Rousseau’s general will apparently furnishes the justification for democracy and dictatorship alike. “To be sure, modern dictatorship differs from absolutism insofar as it calls for the extinction of the individual. It forces him into mass organizations and commits him to a political creed which becomes a “political religion,” a binding religious surrogate. This exaltation of the political rests on the absoluteness of a political myth: in the case of Fascism, the myth is of an imperial past; in the case of Communism, of a socialist-utopian future; and in the case of National Socialism, of racial superiority. Yet, despite the validity of this analysis, it is nonetheless inconclusive. National Socialism and its precursors essentially saw themselves as the great historical countermovements to the French Revolution and all it brought in its wake, as movements against liberalism and libertarian democracy, against individual and human rights, against Western civilization and international socialism. Its affinity for reactionary conservatism shaped both the aims and ideas of its adherents and, ultimately, helped it come to victory. The eradication of liberalism and individualism was the primary self-appointed goal of the National Socialist revolution. Thus, Goebbels, speaking in 1933, stated emphatically: ‘The year 1789 is hereby eradicated from history.’ The intellectual forerunners on whom National Socialism drew in the development of its Weltanschauung were primarily ideologists fervently opposed to the ideas of democratic revolution, human rights, freedom, and equality. “This ideological ‘anti’ front was forged by a combination of four tendencies: a new, essentially imperialistic nationalism; a conservative-authoritarian glorification of the all-powerful state; a nationalist-statist aberration of socialism seeking to combine social romanticism and state socialsm; and, finally, a volkisch community ideology based on race, which, beginning as simple xenophobia, turned into a radical, biological anti-Semitism which ultimately became the major tenet of National Socialism.”
As I read this, I thought that first paragraph and half of the second could
have been penned by you. And yet, at the end of the day, Bracher places
National Socialism on the right – claiming that it is animated by those
right-wing boogeymen imperialism, nationalism, social romanticism and state
socialism (!), and racism. You said that it became impossible to call FDR a
fascist after the Holocaust, and that the Left in America linked the
repressive features of fascism to McCarthy and successfully rebranded
fascism as a right wing phenomenon. But what accounts for this same skewed
frame of reference from a German historian and committed democrat like
Bracher? How did the Germans come to believe that National Socialism, in
spite of their own experience, was the work of capitalists, monarchists and
authoritarians, and right-wing extremists?
Also, what do you make of his reference to Goebbels, or of his contention
that National Socialists saw themselves as counterrevolutionaries to the
events of 1789? Was Goebbels thinking of 1789 as the fountainhead of
international socialism?
Finally, since reading LF I’ve been Googling many famous Nazis and, while
following a few links, ended up at the Vanguard News Network website (some
neo-Nazi movement here in the US). I didn’t stick around long enough to
learn many particulars, but I did notice that one poster was very upset
about “sneaky Jews” who were trying to convince conservatives that fascism
was a leftist movement, when – as everyone knows – it is the purest
expression of conservatism and the only hope for America’s future.
Alongside this post, there was a link to a collection of photographs of
“nude Aryan women” from the Third Reich, posing as Diana the huntress or
exercising outdoors, glorying in “Mother Earth”. Ahh – the “right-wing”
virtues of getting naked and running through the trees.
I guess any book that infuriates the Left and the Nazis in our midst has to
have a lot going for it.
Many thanks and best regards,