The two leitmotifs of the present writer's Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler, 1941, were the rival outlooks of Nietzsche, Wagner: Nietzsche … - Peter Viereck

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.

Unfortunately the European concept "massman" came to America not from its great originators, Burckhardt and Nietzsche, but via its popularizer, the brilliantly learned but oversimplifying Ortega y Gasset. "Massman" is a valid enough term for the American Overadjusted Man but only on the condition that the middleclass nature of the American masses is first recognized and that "massman" is not made synonymous with workingman. Wealthy would-be conservatives, above all the prissy suburban "despisers of the mob," flatter themselves handsomely by assuming that "mass" means only manual worker and that they themselves are not massmen but rugged individualists. Hence the snobbish illusion that individualism is best protected from the mass by an anti-worker, narrowly commercialist politics and economics.

In Nietzsche and [Jakob] Burckhardt the German language had its last great voices of the old Goethean individualism amid the triumphant Bismarck era of statism and mechanized material power. . . . Nietzsche remains unequaled in anticipating out ever-increasing need today for the full, unmechanized personality.