From a reader:

Jonah, I have not yet read your book. I plan to in the near future. While what I have read on NRO and your LF blog has been instructive in seeing the soul of the book, I think just as much could be learned (for me at least) from reading Tolkien and his take on the use of power in the Lord of the Rings series (including the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, particularly the latter). In his books, the Enemy always starts with seemingly fair motives, even to himself; motives of ordering the world, crafting it into the ideal, mastering the convulsions that threaten to rip it apart. But, being as there are free creatures in the world (Elves, Dwarves, and Men), their willing subservience too is needed to achieve the overall goal. If assent is not achieved willingly, then it is attempted via deception, and at the last by force if nothing else will do. The ideal and its achievement, and thus the glory of the one or ones achieveing it, is placed above all else. This seems to me to be why every movement that progresses from liberalism to socialism to fascism (meaning, for my part, an increasing continuum in state control) is essentially and increasingly anti-religious. Religions, particularly Judeo-Christianity, teach us that the ideal world cannot be achieved by man, and that, in fact, he is the very reason it cannot be achieved. Fascism denies this wholesale. It not only believes that the ideal world can be achieved if everyone works together, but also that it should be achieved and must be achieved – often by any means necessary when it comes down to it. Eventually the leader is held in god-like awe. The followers become fanatical in their zeal to carry out the vision and preserve the perceived foundations of the immient paradise about to unfold. It, ironically, becomes a kind of religion unto itself. Heresy is punishable by death. It is a pattern that can not only be found in the modern era. It can be seen throughout human history, from ancient Egypt to the Medieval Catholic Church. It is, truly, found wherever politics is found because politics is essentially the business of forming and maintaining the ideal society in whatever form happens to be fashionable (today it is democracies). Because it is essentially human, it can “live” in any time period and in any framework. At best, it can be exposed and held at bay, as your book attempts. Ultimately, however, while your book is necessary, and while the world would not be better off had it not been written, it and other books like it are futile in solving the problem once and for all. Indeed, it is a problem that cannot be solved by any one person or even all persons collectively. It is perhaps the ultimate argument that, while God may or may not exist, we certainly seem to have a deep-seated need for such an ultimate authority and power. We have an insatiable appetite for the ideal but no way to bring it about ourselves.