What keeps earth air breathable? Not oxygen alone. The earth is a freer place to breathe in, every time you love without calculating a return – every… - Peter Viereck

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 Antoinette's "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.

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."

Something or other is certainly being revived in America today, judging by all these countless examples, but is it religion or religiosity? Religion is demanding, unglib; it combines the hardest spiritual discipline with the most shattering spiritual experience. Therefore, the Overadjusted man prefers religiosity; it is easy, painless, provides a warm, comfortable feeling. Such is ever the fate of values when made bourgeois.