Good stuff:

Jonah,
I was reading D’Souza’s book on Christianity when I bought yours. Put down Dinesh’s until I finished LF. I hope that cheers you up. I then finished Dinesh’s book–which was also very good, by the way.
These negative reviews just raise a bunch of old points that have been obsolete for years, so ignore them. You mention that your book is not intended as a piece of academic history, a point which makes sense to me. An academic book on the topic would have to be something like Kolakowski’s dense three volume “Main Currents of Marxism” and therefore more of a reference book than something to be read as a whole. What you have done is to cover a huge amount of American thought, laying down markers which academics will be addressing for the next decade. Many of them will be reluctant to cite you by name but it is too much information too well presented to be ignored.
A good friend of mine has been sharing his view of your book. He is, it happens, trained as a historian. Well, in fact, his dissertation was on…the progressives. And while I was impressed by the mountain of material that you uncovered, he, more familiar with the sources, thought you had done a fine job pulling together and organizing the material into a convincing theme. What you’ve accomplished is, I think, to show that the real poles of political discussion are not left vs. right nor liberalism vs. conservatism but fascism vs libertarianism or classical liberalism. You have also blasted away those retrospective arguments that hold that if someone in the past was a racist it must have been because he was a conservative. Also, your statement that fascism is an expression of the wish that a society could be like a tribe (or extended family) may have captured the core of this multi-clustered idea a little better than the idea I had that the key to fascism is corporatism.
Finally, you connect fascism with some version of nationalism. I have thought long about this connection, first suggested perhaps by the notion of “socialism in one country”. And there is a tight connection, stemming from the fact that socialism doesn’t work. So a state which adopts fascism will find itself slowly falling behind other states. In commerce, science, and culture, it will eventually become a laggard. What will be the defense against unflattering comparisons, not to mention increasing poverty as it loses in economic competition? Nationalism: restraints on trade and other exposure to wicked competitors. So fascism and nationalism really are siblings. But here is a major difference between today’s liberal fascism and earlier varieties. Liberal fascism despises its own country. This one variation is a major departure from the fascisms of the twentieth century. Also, it will probably be the undoing of today’s liberal movement.
Eagerly awaiting the next volume.