Conservatives are often mocked for supposedly urging "higher things" on some poor proletarian who needs bread. "Let 'em eat culture" is considered as… - Peter Viereck

That whole inconsistent spectrum of Goldwater intellectuals and right-radical magazines. Most of them are so muddled they don't even know when they are being 19th-century liberal individualists (in economics) and when they are being 20th-century semi-fascist thought-controllers (in politics). Logically, these two qualities are contradictory. Psychologically, they unite to make America's typical pseudo-conservative rightist […] Indeed, this new American right seems a very successful concern. On every TV station, on every mass-circulation editorial page, the word "conservatism" in the 1960s has acquired a fame, or at least notoriety, that it never possessed before […] Which is it, triumph or bankruptcy, when the empty shell of a name gets acclaim while serving as a chrysalis for its opposite? The historic content of conservatism stands, above all, for two things: organic unity and rooted liberty. Today the shell of the "conservative" label has become a chrysalis for the opposite of these two things: at best for atomistic Manchester liberalism, opposite of organic unity; at worst for thought-controlling nationalism, uprooting the traditional liberties (including the 5th Amendment) planted by America's founders.

The two leitmotifs of the present writer's 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." . . . Nietzsche's was the only voice in the 1880's to say that Richard Wagner's folk-romanticism and anti-Semitism would make his German nationalist disciples "the destroyers of both German and European culture."

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.