Nietzsche’s Eternal Return in America - American Affairs Journal (2024)

One day in the early 2000s, a goth teenager by the name of Sohrab Ahmari was perusing the shelves of a Salt Lake City bookstore when his gaze landed upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For a misfit atheist adolescent looking for meaning in life outside the bleak conditions of the majority-Mormon trailer park he resided in, the encounter turned out to be love at first sight. Ahmari recalls in his memoir, “To say that I ‘read’ Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra would be an understatement. I took the book home from the store, lay belly down on my bed, and finished it over three or four days, barely stepping out to eat and wash. I consumed Zarathustra, and it consumed me, in turn.”1 Soon after accepting Nietzsche as his (anti-)messiah, Ahmari became “quite literally a card-carrying communist.”2 Indeed, when the Straussian professor Allan Bloom bemoaned Nietzsche-quoting radicals on college campuses in his classic polemic The Closing of the American Mind (1987), he was referring to left-Nietzcheans like the teenaged Ahmari, those that squared Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism with a grand project of ultimate equality.

In the present day, however, Ahmari is no longer the angsty Nietzschean of his youth. Like most goth teenagers learn when they become adults, it was just a phase, after all. Having dropped Dionysius on his road to Damascus, Ahmari is now a Catholic convert who pens polemics against “America’s dime-store Nietzscheans.” These new Nietzscheans have somehow left the Left and have appeared on the right, taking up terminally online noms de guerre like Bronze Age Pervert and L0m3z. Yet such a dramatic difference in political usage is not surprising to those who have known the work of Nietzsche and the rich history of interpretations of his thought in the United States.

American Exceptionalism

Nietzsche once wrote that there was only ever one true Christian, and that he died on the cross. In the same vein, one can say that there was only ever one true Nietzschean, and by the time his monographs landed in American bookstores in the 1890s, he was already confined to his sister’s attic, his mind in the throes of madness after decades of battling intractable migraines. If Nietzsche had stayed sane enough to know of his burgeoning fan base across the pond, he may have delighted in this cultural exchange. After all, before Nietzsche’s work came to America, America came to him, in the form of the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As a teen, Nietzsche had discovered Emerson’s works and read them as thoroughly as Ahmari read Nietzsche. Nietzsche and Emerson had similar life trajectories: they were both Pfarrerskinder (preacher’s chil­dren)3 who later abandoned their ministerial upbringings to launch philosophies of radical individualism. Nietzsche’s Emerson volumes were the most heavily annotated books in his personal library, with the marginalia full of praise for Emerson’s reflections on the nature of the free-spirited individual, outside tradition and convention. Nietzsche apparently saw Emerson as his “twin soul.”4

America has long served as a place where people go to break free from tradition and convention, beginning with Puritans and Quakers fleeing religious persecution5 down to present-day celebrations of America as a “nation of immigrants” and “land of opportunity.” So it is perhaps no surprise that an Emerson-inspired champion of free spirits would find an audience here.

Conversely, some American interpreters specifically embraced Nie­tzsche as a critic of American philistinism; they found in Nietzsche’s Teutonic profundity an escape from an America they saw as too capital­istic, democratic, Christian, and/or anti-intellectual to ever produce worthwhile philosophy.6 Thus, Nietzsche has always had a Janus-faced appeal on this side of the Atlantic: he was, on the one hand, a seemingly Americanized philosopher whose work resonated with American ideals but, on the other, a German philosopher whose superior European intellect revealed the shallowness of American culture.

The very fact that Nietzsche’s philosophy was able to inspire such contradictory interpretations points toward another aspect of American exceptionalism. The theologian Tara Isabella Burton describes how the Enlightenment reshaped Western metaphysics away from imagining humans as actors in a God-created world and toward the invention of the autonomous individual able to create one’s own destiny, thus allowing humans to “become gods.” This led to the notion of “aristo­cratic individualism” in western Europe, the belief that a select few “natural aristocrats” could make themselves into godlike beings. By contrast, the American ethos was shaped by democratic individualism and free market capitalism; anyone, at least in theory, could become a “self-made man” as long as he had enough entrepreneurial flair and the (Protestant) work ethic to make things happen. Thus, while Euro­pean interpretations of Nietzsche often involved narratives in which an Übermensch claimed his “deserved” place in the social hierarchy, Amer­ican interpretations emphasized unshackling oneself from societal con­straints (such as Christian morality) and (re)creating one’s own “truth” and values in a journey of self-actualization.7

This democratic ethos is captured by the homegrown American pragmatist school of philosophy most notably espoused by William James, Emerson’s godson. Pragmatism, at the risk of oversimplification, views truth as a flexible canvas, ready to accommodate whatever beliefs prove the most useful to the truth-seeker. It is a democratizing and individualizing philosophy that allows for the value of various interpretations rather than elevating one eternal or universal truth. Many early American interpreters of Nietzsche immediately saw similarities be­tween Nietzsche’s ideas and American pragmatism.8 The pragmatic American mind allowed for Nietzsche’s work to be utilized in whatever way the readers saw fit, and sure enough, American thinkers produced a dizzying array of interpretations.

Nietzsche also achieved a unique resonance in America because he was known for being a critic of Christianity in a country that has retained Christian belief for much longer than other Western countries. As Christian practice has fallen away in Europe, the United States—also known as Providence, the shining city upon a hill, and one nation under God—has been the one Western liberal democracy that has maintained a strong Christian culture. Fears of an impending right-wing Christian theocracy have been a common theme on the American left over the past few decades, from the Reagan-era “Moral Majority” panic to the Bush-era “theocon” scare to contemporary cris de coeur against Chris­tian nationalism—fears that are generally absent in Western European coun­tries, where the only feared theocracy is an Islamic one. As such, Western critics of Christianity from the Right have mostly been European thinkers such as Oswald Spengler and Dominique Venner, many of whom were practicing neo-pagans.9 While other Western countries were already operating in a post-Christian landscape,10 and thus had little use for criticisms against an irrelevant faith, the continuing relevance of Christianity in America has also meant the continuing relevance of Nietzsche as Christianity’s critic-in-chief.

Only Interpretations

As Nietzsche wrestled with madness in Germany, eventually succumbing to his illness in 1900, his work became a sensation in America, with ideologues of all stripes laying claim to this new titan of Teutonic thought. No individual of the era did more to popularize Nietzsche than H. L. Mencken, a journalist known for his boisterous and scathing cultural commentary, published in his columns in the Baltimore Sun or the American Mercury. In 1908, Mencken published The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first full-length English-language book on Nietzsche’s thought for a mass audience. Not that Mencken was par­ticularly fond of mass audiences: like his idol Nietzsche, Mencken openly expressed his contempt for democracy, preferring the select few over the hoi polloi.

Mencken’s other idée fixe was Christianity, which he claimed “lays its chief stress, not upon the qualities of vigorous and efficient men, but upon the qualities of the weak and parasitic.”11 Not content to just attack Christianity as a whole, Mencken specifically bemoaned what he saw as the continuing influence of Puritanism in American culture long after the actual Puritans lost power: “The Puritan’s utter lack of aes­thetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution—these things have put an almost unbearable burden upon the exchange of ideas in the United States. . . .”12 Mencken linked Nietzsche’s concept of cultural philistinism—of the vapid rabble obsessed with conformity over free thought—to an American neo-Puri­tan spirit that sought to drag down those who dared to think differently.

In attacking two of America’s most sacred value systems, democracy and Christianity, Mencken did indeed stand out against most Americans of his era, as did the others drawn to Nietzsche at the time. Anarchists, feminists, reactionaries, Marxists, atheists, libertarians, and other ideo­logues deeply dissatisfied with the cultural ennui of Gilded Age America all gathered around Nietzsche’s radical rhetoric and polemical prose, taking Nietzsche’s alluring concepts and using them for their own ends, letting a thousand interpretations bloom. The process usually followed along these lines: first, the budding Nietzschean would identify what seemed to be the “slave morality” and “ressentiment” of American society, especially in its espousal of Christian or democratic values, values which were deemed no longer relevant after the “death of God.” The American Nietzscheans would then propose that their ideology—ranging all the way from Max Eastman’s anti-capitalist socialism to Ayn Rand’s hyper-capitalist Objectivism—would overcome America’s stag­nation, liberating the will to power of their preferred Übermenschen.

A major flashpoint in the American reception of Nietzsche’s philoso­phy was the case of Leopold and Loeb. These preternaturally gifted teenagers kidnapped and murdered the fourteen-year-old scion of a wealthy Chicago watch manufacturer in an attempt to pull off the “perfect crime” and prove themselves as Nietzschean Übermenschen, unconstrained by laws and slave morality. Their plan almost worked, except that Leopold’s custom-made glasses were accidentally dropped near the boy’s dead body, allowing police to use Leopold’s human, all-too-human mistake to zero in on the two as the perpetrators.

In what was perhaps prematurely dubbed the “trial of the century,” famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow gave an impassioned eight-hour speech arguing against capital punishment for the teens. Darrow pointed out Nietzsche’s enormous popularity in academia, noting that

There is not a university in the world where the professors are not familiar with Nietzsche, not one: There is not an intellectual man in the world whose life and feelings run to philosophy that is not more or less familiar with the Nietzschean philosophy. . . . Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life on it? . . . Your honor, it is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university. It does not meet my ideas of justice and fairness to visit upon his head the philosophy that has been taught by university men for twenty-five years.13

Darrow was ultimately successful in persuading the judge to spare Leopold and Loeb from the electric chair, a compassionate move that was perhaps, ironically, a demonstration of the slave morality the duo so opposed. It would not even take a year, however, for Darrow to be embroiled in yet another “trial of the century”: the so-called Scopes monkey trial.

One Nietzsche, under God

Darrow defended John Scopes, a teacher accused of violating a Tennessee law banning the teaching of evolutionary theory in schools. William Jennings Bryan, a thrice-failed presidential candidate and a fundamentalist Christian, served as counsel for the prosecution. Not surprisingly, it was none other than Mencken who provided the most scathing mocker­ies of the Christian fundamentalists, penning multiple columns against the “hill-billies” and “yokels” in the Bible Belt (a term Mencken coined) who clung to their creationist beliefs against the tides of modernity. While the prosecution was ultimately successful in convicting Scopes, it was a Pyrrhic victory, for Bryan’s poor performance became an embar­rassment to Christian creationists across America. Not even Bryan’s sudden death a few days after the trial could quiet Mencken’s onslaught, as Mencken published not one but two obituaries denigrating Bryan’s life and Christian beliefs.14

The Scopes Monkey Trial was ostensibly about evolution, but it mainly served as a proxy battle in the war over the question of what exactly Christianity was to be in modern times. This trial occurred against the backdrop of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy rag­ing among American Protestants. Modernists adhered to Enlightenment liberal principles and declared that evolution by natural selection was compatible with Christianity, while fundamentalists reacted against modernism, taking up positions like Biblical inerrancy as a response.15 Many modernists were also involved in the Social Gospel movement of the time, accepting new scientific developments and working to address broader social issues, while fundamentalists rejected these currents.

Whereas fundamentalist theologians were resistant to outside cri­tiques of Christianity, there were a surprising number of modernist theologians who used Nietzsche’s work to interrogate their own beliefs. After all, Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity did not challenge Chris­tian metaphysics but rather its morality. Christians could accept and even celebrate Nietzsche’s historical evaluation of Christian morali­ty while still maintaining the existence and divinity of the Christian God.

One such interpretation came from Reinhold Niebuhr, the most influential American-born theologian of the twentieth century. Niebuhr and Nietzsche were both Pfarrerskinder of German heritage. But unlike his fellow Pfarrerskinder, Nietzsche and Emerson, Niebuhr stayed within the Christian confines of his upbringing; for him, Nietzsche’s interpretation of Christian morality offered grounds for further affirma­tion of this teaching. In his sermon “Transvaluation of Values,” Niebuhr begins by quoting 1 Corinthians:

For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence.

Niebuhr then underscores just how radical a claim Paul made:

The Apostle Paul could hardly have given Nietzsche’s quarrel with Christianity a clearer justification than we find in these uncompromising words. . . . Nietzsche is quite right. Christianity does transvalue historical values. . . . The Christian faith is cen­tered in one who was born in a manger and who died upon the cross. This is really the source of the Christian transvaluation of all values. The Christian knows that the cross is the truth. In that standard he sees the ultimate success of what the world calls failure and the failure of what the world calls success.16

Instead of viewing Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity as attacks to be parried, Niebuhr posits Nietzsche’s critique as Christianity’s ultimate triumph: that Christianity’s sine qua non is in fact slave morality, and the fact that Christianity became the world’s dominant religion is living proof that the slaves have triumphed over the masters, that the pagan gods that symbolized vitality and beauty were successfully replaced by the one true God that inverted Greco-Roman values via the sacralization of a symbol of an emaciated Jew nailed to a slave-executing apparatus.

Niebuhr’s most influential student, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., another Pfarrerskind, would demonstrate this triumph of Christian slave morality by successfully leading the largely nonviolent American civil rights movement. Today, King is one of three figures to have his birthday designated a federal holiday in the United States, the other two being George Washington and Jesus Christ.

The theologian James Cone, founder of black liberation theology, even drew a direct link between the term “slave morality” and the de­scendants of American chattel slavery, writing that,

The lynched black victim experienced the same fate as the crucified Christ and thus became the most potent symbol for understanding the true meaning of the salvation achieved through “God on the Cross.” Nietzsche was right: Christianity is a religion of slaves. God became a slave in Jesus and thereby liberat­ed slaves from being determined by their social condition. The real scandal of the gospel is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the cruci­fied people in our midst. Faith that emerged out of the scandal of the cross is not a faith of intellectuals or elites of any sort. This is the faith of abused and scandalized people—the losers and the down and out.17

Liberal theologians like Niebuhr, Cone, Paul Tillich, and Harvey Cox all wielded significant influence among the modernist, cosmopolitan, and erudite mainline Protestant denominations in opposition to the fundamentalist and anti-intellectual18 evangelical Protestant denominations. From today’s vantage point, it may seem like evangelicals scored an easy cultural victory through sheer attrition. Mainline Protestants had low birth rates and encouraged their children to engage with the broader world, especially by sending their children to college, while evangelicals had higher birth rates and used homeschooling and parallel networks to shut their children off from outside influence. Mainline Protestantism had a focus on racial integration that repelled white segre­gationists, while evangelicals were more willing to overlook segregated communities.19 Mainline Protestantism’s intellectual need to root Chris­tian belief in Enlightenment rationality, sometimes even to the point of viewing God as a metaphor rather than a divine being, alienated more traditionalist Christians. Mainline Protestantism’s emphasis on ecumenicism and tolerance led theologically orthodox congregants to evangelicalism and liberal congregants to Unitarian Universalism and atheism, while evangelicalism made it clear that there was only one road to salva­tion. All these factors led to the slow institutional collapse of mainline Protestantism starting in the 1960s, with evangelicalism gradually taking over as the face of American Christianity.20

Yet the decline of mainline Protestantism did not mean the disappearance of mainline Protestant morality, just as, in Nietzsche’s diagno­sis, the decline of Christian belief (the “death of God”) would not mean the end of Christian-induced morality. As college campuses became packed with the progeny of mainline Protestants, many students began to question their metaphysical belief in God while still retaining their morality. Many such children, along with the non-orthodox Jews who shared the same college campuses, began creating a nontheistic foundation for their morality in the form of critical theory. The result was a new religious movement that drew its converts from the most educated echelons of society and saw itself as based in pure reason, a movement that was later dubbed “wokeness.”

Thus, in the custody war between American Protestants over who got to define Christian morality, the two branches cut the baby in half: evangelicals got Christian, the mainline got morality.

Thus Woke Zarathustra

Right-wing interpretations of Nietzsche were deemed taboo in the dec­ades after the Nazis. In postwar America, the only respectable ways to interpret Nietzsche were either through the Nietzsche-as-existentialist framing pioneered by the émigré Walter Kaufmann, or the “New Nietzsche” brought to America by French post-structuralists—inter­pretations that brushed away or reinterpreted Nietzsche’s more reac­tionary thinking. American leftists, as usual, hungered for European minds, looking for a foreign philosopher who could romanticize their cosmopolitan radicalism against what they saw as the “anti-intellectual­ism in American life,” the title and central claim of a 1963 Pulitzer-winning book by American academic Richard Hofstadter. The book not only took aim at forces on the American right, such as evangelical Christianity (which, as mentioned earlier, prized revelation over reason) and capitalism (which prized practicality over abstraction), but also criticized the American Left, arguing that the “cult of proletarianism” that pervaded socialist movements forced left-wing intellectuals to “de­class themselves spiritually,” leading to “a certain self-depreciation and self-alienation.”21 While Hofstadter only mentions Nietzsche in passing, it is not difficult to see how his analysis reflects an appetite among American middle-class intellectuals for a more aristocratic leftism, par­ticularly one with an anti-Christian, anti-democratic, anti-proletarian, and non‑American philoso­pher as its figurehead.

The Nietzschean post-structuralists became popular in the academy at around the same time that many American Protestants were losing their faith in God, and Nietzsche’s attacks on Christianity provided the perfect philosophy for a secularizing generation. Nietzsche’s brief aphorism written in a private notebook, “There are no facts, only interpretations,” became the cornerstone on which they built their critical theory. Christianity was hegemonic for much of Western society, but there are other grand narratives, so the argument goes, that are just as valid, and because truth is relative, one cannot just accept Christian truth as objective truth. Postmodern was the term used to describe this loss of grand narratives, although many contemporary conservative commentators misconstrue the term as being prescriptive rather than simply an accurate description of the multivariate narratives that spawned following the death of God.22

Nietzsche’s writings on this seeming loss of objective truth and his Emersonian-inflected encouragement of radical individualism, bolstered by new translations of his books by Walter Kaufmann (whose Jewish heritage helped dispel links between Nietzsche and anti-Semitism), re­stored Nietzsche’s place as a respectable philosopher. American pragma­tism and Nietzsche’s own suspicion of objectivity helped encourage a spirit of anything-goes interpretation, allowing left-wing radicals to drink freely from the well of a philosopher who despised leftism. Nietzsche wasn’t the only right-wing philosopher to receive such airbrushing: even though the jurist Carl Schmitt was a literal Nazi at one point, that didn’t stop his work from being translated, printed, and analyzed in leftist publications like Telos and the New Left Review decades before Schmitt’s name appeared in the work of postliberal Right figures such as Adrian Vermeule.

Nietzsche and Schmitt were popular outside the Right in part because they were entertaining. Compared to, say, the snoozefest of John Rawls’s monographs, Nietzsche’s acerbic prose made leftists feel like free-thinking radicals valiantly dismantling Christian hegemony, and Schmitt’s conceptualization of the political as a war between friends and enemies made these academic radicals feel like literal social justice warri­ors.23

The most prominent Nietzschean thinker born from this postmodern milieu was Michel Foucault, whose writings on the connection between power and truth have been used for decades to attack those who posit objective truth, arguing that such claims to objectivity are simply ways for those in power to maintain their oppression of groups without power. Considering that Christianity was still the central moral force in America back in the 1960s and ’70s, in an era that Aaron Renn refers to as the “positive world” for American Christianity, it made sense for those who wanted to attack the hegemonic morality to attack Christian values, and no philosopher came down harder on Christianity than Nietzsche.

But that was then; this is now. American Christianity currently exists in a “negative world” where, as Renn puts it, “Being known as a Chris­tian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order.”24 Such a change in social position has also led to a reversal in the old order of battle in the war of objectivism versus relativism. While interpretations of Foucault’s work on power have long been the domain of leftists, Foucault has recently received right-wing reappraisals from Geoff Shullenberger, Blake Smith, and Sohrab Ahmari—all of whom, unsurprisingly, were former leftists.25 As Ross Douthat has noted,

The idea that the left is relativistic belongs to an era when progres­sives were primarily defining themselves against white heteronormative Christian patriarchy, with Foucauldian acid as a solvent for the old regime. Nobody watching today’s progressivism at work would call it relativistic: Instead, the goal is increasingly to find new rules, new hierarchies, new moral categories to govern the post-Christian, post-patriarchal, post-cis-het world. . . . Mean­while, conservatives, the emergent regime’s designated ene­mies, find themselves drawn to ideas that offer what Shullenberger calls a “systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern power operates”—even when those ideas belong to their old relativist and postmodernist enemies.26

This meta-example vindicates Foucault’s theories on truth. When power was vested in the political Right, right-wingers defended objec­tive truth while their opponents proclaimed relativism. But when power structures changed to favor the Left, progressives began demanding total fealty to their ideology while their opponents became more open to “alternative facts” and critiquing the “liberal lamestream media.” Truth really does seem tied to power after all.

And what of the seemingly contradictory role Christianity plays in this narrative? Nietzsche and early interpreters like Mencken savaged Christianity as the progenitor of leftism, whereas critical theorists characterized Christianity as one of many oppressive right-wing forces, a pillar of “white heteronormative Christian patriarchy.” It may seem odd to many practitioners and observers of American Christianity, espe­cially to the white evangelicals who have most politicized the word “Christian,” that Nietzsche would claim Christianity is driven by a “slave morality” that valorizes meekness and asceticism. The political party that nominally represents American Christianity is the same party that valorizes cutthroat capitalism, boasts of being tough on crime and illegal immigration, mocks “soy-boys” and “hippies” while celebrating red-meat consumption and AR-15s, and whose de facto leader is an adulterous billionaire who revels in the crude mockery of perceived enemies.

On the other side, those who seemingly claim to oppose Christian values in favor of moral relativism are in actuality promoting slave morality as objective morality.27 Postmodernists imagine themselves as moral relativists ready to embrace any number of perspectives. There lurks, however, one objective moral absolute within their allegedly nonobjective framework: the concern for victims. Such a concern is so axiomatic that it is offensive to even suggest otherwise: slave morality, to most living in a “post-Christian” society, is just basic morality. Post­modernism thus contains two essential yet contradictory elements: (1) a critique, deconstruction, and ultimately destruction of reason, truth, and metaphysics (the “death of God”); and (2) a further entrenchment and affirmation of the Christian “truth” of the ethic of concern for victims.28

Progressivism29 is the undisputed reigning ideology of the American academy today, enforcing a Christian-derived ideology of egalitarianism, universalism, and “scientific” objectivity while acting like these principles were derived from secular rationalism.30 On the other hand, American right-wingers are more amenable to “alternative facts,” and although nominally Christian, often embrace forms of tribalism and social hierarchy.31

This seeming contradiction in nominal versus practiced Christian morality can be resolved. Over time, Christian morality, especially in its image of the triumph of the oppressed over the oppressor, became so ingrained in the Western psyche that Christian principles acquired axiomatic status. Meanwhile, Christianity also became a symbol of tradition and of Western civilization. Almost everyone was nominally Christian for most of American history. Whether or not they actually believed in Christian metaphysics or its morality, they grounded whatever political views they had on nominally Christian grounds. Then, as detailed in the last section, the side that was more left-wing stopped believing in God, while the side that was more right-wing held more firmly to Christian tradition, thus giving contemporary observers the impression that Christianity is a right-wing bulwark against leftism.

By separating nominal Christian identification from the Christian concern for victims, there exists four combinations that can be visualized on a two-by-two matrix. The first two positions are woke secular progressivism and right-wing Christian traditionalism or (for American Protestants) evangelicalism, as detailed above. The third position is progressive Christianity, the faith of mainline seminaries and cosmopolitan churches with Progress Pride flags hanging outside. Finally, there is an increasingly popular fourth position: a new right-wing Nietzscheanism.

Selective Reading and the Birth of Philosophy

As contemporary leftists no longer find much use in moral relativism, left-wing Nietzscheanism has faded into the twentieth century, and as the Nazi associations of right-wing Nietzscheanism have eroded with time, the latter has experienced a recent resurgence. No thinker has pushed Nietzsche more forcefully into the contemporary political con­sciousness than the political philosopher and online personality Costin Alamariu, who expounds a version of right-wing Nietzschean thought for online audiences as Mencken once did for readers of the Baltimore Sun.

Alamariu, by his own account, first became enamored with Nietzsche at age sixteen, and unlike the other teenage Nietzscheans at his suburban Massachusetts high school, he has remained faithful to Nie­tzsche throughout his adult life, later writing his Yale doctoral dissertation on “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche.”32 After rising to niche internet fame on “Frog­twitter,” an anonymous constellation of alt-right social media personalities, Alamariu came to greater prominence in 2018 with a tract titled Bronze Age Mindset (hereafter, BAM), published under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert. At less than two hundred pages long and split into seventy-seven Nietzschean-style aphoristic chapters filled with edgy pidgin-like prose, BAM spans a grab bag of topics ranging from ancient Greek history to the psychology of homosexuality (a “gay science,” if you will) to complaints of there being too many Mormons in the CIA. At several points in the book, Alamariu informs the reader that Nie­tzsche had previously made many of Alamariu’s own observations, and he updates Nietzsche’s “Last Man” to what he calls the “bugman”—a muliebral figure who lives for nothing but mindless consumption and who promotes leftist politics out of deep envy for the strong and beautiful.

To avoid the bugman trap, Alamariu exhorts disaffected young men to revive ancient Greek modes of male friendship and to go on swashbuckling journeys as modern-day pirates. BAM has gained a cult follow­ing, with Michael Anton writing a glowing review in the Claremont Review of Books declaring that, among disaffected right-wing American youth, Buckleyism is losing while BAPism is winning.33 Tired of the not‑so-beautiful losers of “Conservatism Inc.,” who BAPists claim only capitulate to the Left while pretending to push back, these new Nie­tzscheans want to overthrow the current political system in favor of a Caesar who can clean up “trashworld” for good.

In contrast to his idol Nietzsche, who centered Christianity and its historical impact in his writing,34 Alamariu pays relatively little attention to Christian history and theology.35 Rather than finding leftism’s fons et origo in Christianity, as Nietzsche does, Alamariu traces the origin of such morality to the “longhouse,” a metonym for the risk-averse and egalitarian matriarchal societies that supposedly existed before the advent of civilization, whose norms have returned through modern feminism. Men once conquered cities and put them to the sword and fire, so the narrative goes. But in our sclerotic modern age, would-be warriors and aristocrats of the soul have been “longhoused,” their vitality drained by girlfriends who drag them to wine bars.

While BAM readily demeans Jews, Muslims, and Mormons, Ala­mariu writes of Christianity that “Offending Christians in political movements is stupid, when they’re one of the last bastions against a common enemy.”36 The only time he invokes Christianity negatively is a comment about how modern-day leftists are not relativistic but are rather like “Presbyterian schoolmarms.” Perhaps the longhouse concept itself is a Straussian maneuver: the longhouse serves as the unifying scapegoat that forges an alliance of right-wing Christians and Nietzscheans, as Christians would otherwise be offended by heavy-handed criti­cism of Christianity.

In Alamariu’s dissertation, however, recently republished with an added foreword under the title Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, there is no mention of the longhouse, apart from a solitary quip about “gyno-gerontocratic democracy.” Here, Alamariu does pro­mote Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity, especially Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity is Platonism for the masses. In his new introduction, Alamariu argues that the Christian ban on cousin marriage genetically altered European people to be prone to egalitarian and universalist ideologies, a theory that recently gained mainstream traction (albeit with the opposite spin) when it was advanced in anthropologist Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020).37

Alamariu’s ambivalent treatment of Christianity seems to reflect its peculiar status, and contradictory political valences, in America today. Alamariu is probably the first American interpreter of Nietzsche to grapple with his critique of “slave morality” in the time of “negative world” Christianity: the establishment enforcers of this morality are avowedly anti-Christian, while self-professed Christians see themselves as part of a right-wing rebellion against it.

Indeed, BAPism, despite all its paeans to ancient Greece, retains a distinctively American ethos, even beyond its earnest participation in contemporary partisan politics. Part of this is due to Alamariu’s Strauss­ian intellectual heritage. Leo Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany and émigré to the United States, lent European intellectual prestige to de­fenses of the American “regime” and became one of the most influential thinkers of Cold War–era American conservatism. At a time when left-Nietzschean moral relativism was gaining steam in academia, Strauss’s philosophy (which in many aspects drew from Nietzsche as well38) offered American conservatives an intellectual defense of “natural right.” Strauss’s interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy as a counter to modern post-Enlightenment philosophy, particularly German existentialism, gave readers a chance to Americanize the “wisdom of the ancients,” especially with regard to the American founding. America, in this narrative—later given popular expression by Straussians such as Allan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama—was the bearer and protector of Western civilization, fending off intellectual critics, political enemies, and dangerous philosophical mutations from abroad. It is telling that after Strauss’s death, his students split themselves into two camps named not by specific ideologies or people, but by American geographic loca­tions. With the exception of China, where philosophy professor Liu Xiaofeng has nearly single-handedly popularized Strauss to a Chinese audience, Straussianism has mainly been an American endeavor.39

Alamariu, too, has an immigrant background. He came to America from Romania at age ten, so he still retained memories of the old country as he attempted to assimilate into his new one. Alamariu didn’t fit neatly into the literal black-and-white American racial schema, as he is Balkan and Ashkenazi Jewish, and thus may have had trouble assimi­lating into a coherent identity, and like many other teens with identity crises, he turned to Nietzsche.40

Julius Krein has hinted at the possibility that some of Strauss’s (and thus also Alamariu’s) philosophical contours can be analyzed through the work of John Murray Cuddihy, a sociologist known for his mono­graphs on American Jewish culture and American civil religion.41 Cuddihy argues that the nineteenth-century project of Jewish emancipation, which allowed European Jews to leave their ghettos and join Western society, resulted in an “ordeal of civility,” in which Jews had to give up their Yiddishkeit (their “Jewishness”) in order to adopt what Cuddihy called the “Protestant Esthetic and Etiquette,”42 to be “civi­lized” into the Western liberal world. What made the ordeal difficult, though, was that Jewish intellectuals who went through this process experienced shame for rejecting the “vulgar” Yiddishkeit of their ances­tors. Cuddihy spends much of The Ordeal of Civility arguing that many of the ideas proposed by Jewish intellectuals like Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Claude Lévi-Strauss were attempts to establish as universals what were originally mere expressions of Yiddishkeit.43

Cuddihy’s book contains an epigraph from the Jewish “New York intellectual” Lionel Trilling: “The German Jews . . . were likely to be envied and resented by East European Jews for what would have been called their refinement.”44 Cuddihy discusses at length Eastern Euro­pean Jews in particular, especially in his “tale of two Hoffmans” of the Chicago Seven trial, examining the difference between the assimilated judge Julius Hoffman, who maintains Protestant civility, versus the vulgar Ostjude Abbie Hoffman, who disrupted civil society in attempting to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.45

Viewed through a Cuddihian lens, Strauss can be seen as the civilized German Jewish émigré, the respectable University of Chicago professor who represents a successful product of Jewish emancipation into the secularized Protestantism of Western modernity (at least outwardly as a “friend” of America’s liberal regime). Alamariu, meanwhile, plays (note that he plays the part, channeled through his BAP persona, rather than is in actuality) the vulgar Ostjude who rejects modernity, writing in pidgin‑like prose and hosting an iconoclastic podcast in which he talks with a thick Romanian accent.

Hence the different attitudes Strauss and Alamariu display toward Nietzsche. Whereas the respectable Strauss often portrays Nietzsche as a dangerous and misguided thinker, as a promoter of moral relativism against natural right, Alamariu plays the vulgar, unassimilated Jew who idolizes Nietzsche—the ultimate critic of Christianity and modernity—while railing against assimilation into the Western secularized-Protestant civil religion. Similarly, one can frame Alamariu’s squabbles with his dissertation adviser Steven B. Smith—a Straussian who previously wrote a book arguing that liberalism’s origins can be found in Jewish thought—as a dispute between the assimilated Jew and the Ostjude over the latter’s explicit rejection of secular Protestant civility, with Alamariu playing Abbie Hoffman to Smith’s Julius Hoffman. Indeed, Smith told the journalist Graeme Wood, “I was shocked that his family would escape Ceaușescu’s Romania only for Costin to undermine the principles of [American] democracy.”46

From one angle, then, Alamariu can be seen as the leader of a terrifying movement of pagan vitalist bodybuilders ready to release lions from zoos and overthrow bugman society. But from another angle, Alamariu conforms perfectly to the trite trope of an Eastern European Jew who moves to a Western liberal democracy and refuses to melt into the secularized Protestant pot, eventually inventing an entire ideology to universalize a particular cultural expression. Such a story—the immigrant Kulturkampf between the pressure of assimilating to a new society while perhaps still feeling nostalgia toward the old one—is a quintessential narrative of this “nation of immigrants.”47

To be sure, Cuddihy’s work could be dismissed as ungrounded psychological speculation, and a few early reviewers felt that the book played to anti-Semitic canards and relied too much on post hoc rational­izations. But it is notable that Alamariu himself has endorsed Cuddihy’s thesis. In episode 27 of his podcast Carribean Rhythms, Alamariu sum­marizes and endorses The Ordeal of Civility. So whether or not Cuddi­hy’s central thesis is true, it appears that Alamariu believes it is, and Alamariu’s participation in online anti-Semitic right-wing spaces, despite his Jewish background, may have created a Kulturkampf in which BAPism emerged, retconning the provincial shtetl mindset into a more universal “Bronze Age” one. Such a tale of democratic self-making—in which an immigrant Eastern European Jew, a character long denigrated by right-wingers as a subverter of Western civilization, could rise to become a leading figure within those anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic circles—could happen, one is tempted to say, “only in America.”48

So what has been the impact of Alamariu’s Nietzschean exhortations? Perhaps true BAPists are too busy living lives of sun and steel to be shackled to smartphones and social media, because the anonymous online “vitalists” extolling BAPism don’t seem especially vital. Nietzsche famously attacked Christianity for bringing Platonism’s split-world metaphysics to the masses, giving people hope in a utopian world outside the physical one, much like how terminally online BAPists are giving up real-world success in exchange for a parallel online world where “likes” and “follows” serve as artificial status (“copes,” in internet parlance) and ressentiment-fueled mob mentality is actively encouraged. It still remains to be seen if Alamariu’s online success can translate to the physical world.

The Silicon Gospel

While contemporary right-wing Nietzscheans typically side with Dionysus, there are a few who extol the Crucified.49 One predicted the potential and perils of online politics early on. The tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who was an early investor in Facebook after seeing its potential to harness human desire, has generated controversy over the years for his promotion of antidemocratic right-wing politics.

Thiel noted in a speech at a New Criterion gala in 2023 that there are two schools of Nietzschean thought operating on the American right. One “boils down to a strong-man argument—think of Bronze Age Pervert and other internet types—that says, well, the West may in fact be chauvinist, racist, sexist, and all the other things it’s accused of being, but we should embrace that rather than apologize for it.”50 The other, Thiel hints, lies in a statement made by Nietzsche at the end of his life declaring that the “God of the Jews” had won—that the concern for victims brought about by Christianity has become the de facto concern of the West, so instead of trying to undo this transvaluation of values, a return to Christianity may be key to saving Western civilization.

Thiel himself identifies as a Christian while also acknowledging that wokeness is a sort of “ultra-Christianity.”51 In the same New Criterion speech, he argues that “The so-called woke religion is a perversion of this Judeo-Christian tradition . . . they are so closely related that we might call wokeness a particularly Christian temptation.” Thiel here is borrowing from his mentor back when he was an undergraduate at Stanford, the late Catholic anthropologist René Girard, who wrote that

What only the great insight of a Nietzsche could formerly perceive, now even a child can perceive. . . . The fact that our world has become solidly anti-Christian, at least among its elites, does not prevent the concern for victims from flourishing—just the opposite. The majestic inauguration of the “post-Christian era” is a joke. We are living through a caricatural “ultra-Christianity” that tries to es­cape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by “radicalizing” the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner.52

Thiel has made the promotion of Girard’s work central to his political ambitions over the past two decades, constantly name-dropping Girard in various speeches and essays, starting a think tank dedicated to Girard’s work, and passing Girard’s theories down to his own acolytes, most notably to JD Vance, who cites Girard’s theories as a major impe­tus for his own conversion to Catholicism.53 Girard, in turn, considered Nietzsche to be the primary inspiration for his own theories on the centrality of Christianity in human history.

Girard’s historical account of religion goes as follows: Human desire is fundamentally mimetic; humans want what other humans want. Such desires lead to mimetic rivalry since two people cannot possess the same object. Mimetic rivalry thus increases among a society, threatening the society’s cohesion. Human societies found a way to stop this ever-increasing rivalry through blaming all their problems on a scapegoat and killing it, allowing a society to unleash its pent-up mimetic rivalry and restore peace. The societal peace that the scapegoat brought paradoxically made society worship it as a god: the sacrificed deity that stopped mimetic rivalry from destroying the community. Thus, it is the violence of the sacrifice that creates the sacred (note the shared etymology of sacred and sacrifice), which is ritualized into religion. And while Christi­anity appears to have begun the same way, there is one crucial difference: Christ, the victim, is fully innocent, while Christ’s victimizers are complicit in the literal death of God, thus exposing the scapegoat mechanism as a folly and forcing the victimizers to look inward rather than finding an outsider to blame. Christ’s teachings of turning the other cheek also end the cycle of mimetic rivalry, as violence is reciprocated not with revenge, but with peace, thus also mimetically imbuing the victimizers with a desire for peace.

It is almost trite these days to say that wokeness is like Christianity without forgiveness. Yet this statement makes perfect sense in a Girard­ian framework: wokeness retains the slave morality of Christianity without Christ to expose and prevent the scapegoat mechanism. There is no mechanism in place for forgiving transgressions, so the cycle of violence repeats endlessly as woke adherents compile an ever-expanding list of transgressions to justify tearing down more statues and engaging in more struggle sessions. Girard draws extensively from Nietzsche throughout his works, arguing that it was Nietzsche who first glimpsed the violent scapegoat mechanism and recognized the special case of the innocent Christ as the transvaluation of values that it was.54 But while Nietzsche saw the death of God as a foregone conclusion, providing readers with a new model of human flourishing in the Übermensch (whose greatest act, it should be noted, is overcoming the desire for revenge, particularly revenge against time), Girard and his adherents still see the possibility of a mass conversion to Christianity that will stop runaway mimetic rivalry from bringing about an apocalyptic world.

Girard thus provides a neo-Chestertonian apologia for Christianity: if man does not believe in God, he will believe in anything, so it is best that society all believes in God to avoid the uncertainty of the “any­thing.” And while most anthropologists working under liberal principles are wont to view Christianity as just another religion in a pluralistic society, Girard’s framework posits Christianity as primus inter pares, the only religion able to stop the cycle of scapegoating. Meanwhile, as Girard points out, contemporary atheists believe that society has no need for God while still clinging to the morality created by Christianity. Nietzsche was the one who pointed out this contradiction and simply took it to its logical conclusion.55

When Thiel became an early investor in Facebook, he had the prescience to realize that the new frontiers opened by social media would completely reshape human life. And it has been Thiel’s promotion of Girard that has mimetically led to the widespread adoption of Girard’s theories by right-wing Silicon Valley elites.

It’s worth noting how strange it is that the actual impact of Girardian thought has largely been siloed to a uniquely American institution: Silicon Valley. There could just as easily be a coherent left-Girardianism, especially considering that Girard views the Nietzschean critique of Christianity’s impact as a validation, echoing Reinhold Niebuhr before him. In fact, Girard’s magnum opus I See Satan Fall Like Lightning was published not by a conservative or right-wing press but rather by Orbis Books, a left-wing Catholic publisher best known for publishing Latin American liberation theology and other Marxist-inspired works.

It is a testament to the culture of Silicon Valley, and to the pragmatic and entrepreneurial spirit of America itself, that ideas originally intend­ed as Christian apologia are instead more likely to be read in VC-backed start-ups. Thiel’s bestselling Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014) and start-up guru Luke Burgis’s Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (2021) both secularize Girard’s ideas into business tips. Girard’s theories on scapegoating and mimetic desire are now used by Silicon Valley software engineers not as Christian hermeneutical tools but rather for the creation of social media algorithms that maximize user engagement and sales. The contemplative spiritual core of Girard’s work turned out to be no match for the entrepreneurial and pragmatic spirit of the land that produced Edward Bernays. The idea that Christian principles can and should make one rich, not just spiritually but also in the form of cold, hard cash, is as American an ethos as it gets, conjuring up images of “Prosperity Gos­pel” televangelists with private jets promising their audiences that God wants them to become millionaires.

Thus, it is perhaps not a surprise that among today’s right-wing American Nietzscheans, it seems possible for a marriage of convenience: instead of positing a Manichaean struggle between Dionysus and the Crucified, they view the two as (to borrow a term from Christology) consubstantial. Thiel mentioned during a conference on Girard that he preferred the Christianity of Constantine over the Christianity of Mother Theresa.56 Similarly, Alamariu praises the actions of Christian conquistadors in BAM. And First Things, the flagship journal of the American Christian Right, published an explainer on the longhouse concept written by a friend of Alamariu.

In Nietzsche’s notes, later published by his sister under the title The Will to Power, he muses of an Übermensch that is a “Caesar with Christ’s soul.”57 Perhaps, then, the seemingly contradictory concept of “Christianity with Nietzschean characteristics”—or vice versa—is not as far-fetched as one may imagine it to be.

Nietzsche as American Philosopher

All these interpretations of Nietzsche—from the anti-Christian and antidemocratic jottings of radicals in America’s Progressive Era, to the praise of liberal Christian theologians against evangelical fundamentalists, to the anti-proletarian leftists allegedly promoting moral relativism, to the online “vitalists” fantasizing about toppling the government, to the Silicon Valley Girardians with their plans for digitally harnessing mimetic desire, and countless others—show the sheer versatility and breadth of Nietzschean thought in America.

From one angle, the eternal recurrence of Nietzschean thought in this nation of immigrants suggests a cultural stagnancy shaped by the unique American intellectual scene (or lack thereof): the never-ending subservience to European “courtly muses” as arbiters of high culture. The American individualistic spirit paradoxically creates affinities for what is not American, an “ancient-shaped hole” that leads Americans to come up with their own convoluted histories connecting America back to a society that actually had ancients (as in the “retvrn” role-playing on the right). Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley cult of technology promises maximal individualism but has only ended up harnessing mimetic desire for profit, and whose smartphones have led to a societal flattening, the impact of which requires a dozen more Byung-Chul Han tracts to fully comprehend.

From another angle, however, Nietzsche’s continued presence and resonance in America suggests that he never forgot his Emersonian inheritance. Although Nietzsche’s self-creating individuals and free spirits take their bearings from man’s deepest spiritual yearnings and conflicts—rather than the shallow self-interest of anglophone classical liberalism—his characters are immediately and perpetually recognizable to American democrats, pragmatists, and entrepreneurs. Nietzsche’s followers in America, therefore, always seem at once the country’s most vehement critics and quintessentially American types. Indeed, Nietzsche might well be understood as a temporarily embarrassed American. Übermensch, after all, can be translated as Superman—and what’s more American than the story of an identity-changing reporter and caped superhero invented by the assimilated sons of Jewish immigrants?

Nietzsche spoke little of America itself, but, seemingly channeling Tocqueville before him, he described “that American faith of today” as one “where the individual is convinced of being able to do just about anything, of being capable of just about any role, where each person experiments with himself, improvises, experiments anew, experiments joyfully; where all nature ceases and becomes art.”58 And that is exactly what the pragmatic American spirit has done, not least in interpreting Nietzsche himself.

More than a century after Nietzsche’s death, his writings still exist in a state of eternal recurrence, his clarion calls ready to be heeded by generation upon generation of disaffected Americans. Nietzsche gave up his Prussian citizenship in 1869, wandering around stateless the rest of his life. Perhaps if he had sailed across the Atlantic to the land of his childhood hero, Emerson, he might have found that America was his true home.

In Nietzsche’s magnum opus Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the protagonist Zarathustra is led by two friendly animals: an eagle with a snake coiled around its neck. While Nietzsche was almost certainly not think­ing about the United States in deploying these symbols, it is well within the power of American pragmatism to interpret this imagery—and Nietzsche himself—as deeply American. The wise snake represents the unity and defiance of the American people, with its call to “join, or die” and its warning of “don’t tread on me.” The proud eagle, soaring across the skies, represents America’s strength and independent spirit. The two intertwined animals guide Zarathustra’s path, as he climbs down from his mountaintop cave and toward the city upon a hill.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 4 (Winter 2024): 219–40.

Notes