Something or other is certainly being revived in America today, judgin — Peter Viereck

"The two leitmotifs of the present writers Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler, 1941, were the rival outlooks of Nietzsche, Wagner: Nietzsche as the voice warning Germany against nationalism, anti-Semitism, herd-collectivism; Wagner as the voice teaching Hitler his Aryan racism, anti-parliamentary leadership-cult, anti-aristocratic cult of the collective "folk." . . . Nietzsches was the only voice in the 1880s to say that Richard Wagners folk-romanticism and anti-Semitism would make his German nationalist disciples "the destroyers of both German and European culture."

"Conservatives are often mocked for supposedly urging "higher things" on some poor proletarian who needs bread. "Let em eat culture" is considered as sinful a conservative evasion of social conscience as Marie Antoinettes "Let em eat cake." But what happens after the admittedly primary need for bread is satisfied? Thereafter the humanistic conservative can no longer be accused of fleecing the toilers if he insists: American material progress should from now on make increasing concessions to cultural inwardness."

"Germany was historically ahead of us in being ripe for Fascism. We in America can expect similar developments from similar causes. These causes are more basic and world-wide than Versailles; an overmechanized and overspecialized industrial society is spawning mass men, instead of responsible, self-disciplined individuals rooted in the universal moral values."

"Compare two photographs: Charles Baudelaire and this angular, harsh-faced professor of the Union Theological Seminary, who for years was pastor of a congregation of automobile workers in Detroit. The eyes of both have the same intensity, the same bitter integrity. Like Kierkegaard, Niebuhr is not merely "painfully sincere" but downright cadaverously sincere. The spiritual demands of his outspoken sermons indict not only the dead rottenness behind a godless hedonism but also the self-deception behind a facile, overconfident idealism."

"Without inner psychological liberty, outer civil liberties are not quite enough. We can talk civil liberties, prosperity, democracy with the tongues of men and angels, but it is merely a case of "free from what?" and not "free for what?" if we use this freedom for no other purpose than to commit television or go lusting after supermarkets."

"The motive for tyranny is not economics but will to power. Behind power, such motives as vanity, inferiority complex, sadism, fear, frustration, and just plain cussedness must also be considered."