From a reader:

Jonah–
One of your Chicago libertarian fans, here, prompted by a couple of recent posts to chime in that Tolkien’s friend, colleague and fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis also had something to say about fascism.
That Hideous Strength is the third book in Lewis’ “Space Trilogy”, not so well-known as Lord of the Rings because you have to simultaneously be a serious but open-minded theist, know some medieval history and mythology, and really enjoy weird genre fiction to find it a good read. It’s well-written but not for kids, and it probably wouldn’t make a good movie outside of one’s imagination. But in this novel, Lewis offers highly perceptive insights into how fascism operates as he tells the story of a group of evil people, the puppets of supernatural baddies, trying to take over England and the world right after WWII. They work through a front organization, the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments–and that smiley-face of an acronym is deliberate. Lewis paints a clever and cautionary picture of how rapidly such a group can catch the public off-guard and infiltrate institutions under the guise of Advancing Humanity through the March of Science with Planned Efficiency unfettered by Red Tape! But their real aim is to cleanse the planet of all human values, and ultimately of all people too, to achieve a bizarre, amoral vision of a truly “pure” race. Says one of the inner ring (with an Italian accent) “This Institute–Dio meo, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer….It is to bring out … the New Man … the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.”
The specifics of what he has in mind are like something from Doctor Who, and I can’t explain briefly how the good guys manage to save humanity, but that’s not the point. Lewis really understood the corruption of power, the insidious attraction of the cabal, and that its ends, while held up to be worth the price, must prove even worse than the means. Moreover–as Tolkien also did with the hobbits–he portrays the instinctive repugnance of the non-reeducated to the first incremental steps of such a program as a free and healthy society’s best safeguard.
(if you use this, don’t post my name)