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"What is America," Hitler once said to one of his seconds, "but millionaires, beauty queens, stupid records, and Hollywood?" It is an observation that has often been made about the United States, not quite accurate, but not without its merits. What Hitler disliked about the United States was not its ideology (I suppose he assumed it never had a self-respecting ideology worthy of a mature, "racially pure" people) but rather its popular culture, the great leveler of taste, tradition, and thought, the force that unraveled ideology by stating simplistically that what is popular is what is important.
This is made clear in many passages in Mein Kampf; for instance, when Hitler speaks of the destruction of the German working classes: "Day by day, in the theater and in the movies, in backstairs literature and the yellow press, [the bourgeoisie] see the poison poured into the people by bucketfuls, and then they are amazed at the low 'moral content,' the 'national indifference,' of the masses of the people." So Hitler saw the German working classes on the verge of the same abyss that had claimed the Americans: cheap popular culture, empty of anything but distraction and sensation, reducing life from the heroic exercise of the will and the fulfillment of historical destiny to an escape from boredom and lassitude.
In 1962, George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, said in a speech at Carleton College, "In between the Nazis and the Communists is the great mass of non-fanatics, the TV watchers and the comic book readers." In between the two great warring ideologies was the wasteland of the uncommitted, the unaware, the uninvolved, the great masses sleepwalking through history, drugged by advertising (a field in which Rockwell once worked, which may explain his cynicism), frustrated by falsely generated and irrelevant desires, and satiated by cheap, useless consumer goods.
Rockwell, like Hitler, had a low regard for the taste of the masses. (At the height of his notoriety in the 1960s, Rockwell spent his time, when he was not agitating social unrest, writing while listening to J. S. Bach, a certain proof that one's taste in music is completely unrelated to one's taste in politics, or to one's morality, although Rockwell, like many others at various points on the political spectrum, did not see it that way.) In effect, like Hitler, Rockwell had a low regard for the United States, despite his professed love for his country, despite the fact that he fought for his country in two wars (World War II and Korea), despite his implacable hatred of communism as the evil antithesis of America. He, too, saw America as a shallow place, with petty values, bad taste, and a madness for money; this was why Rockwell thought America was so vulnerable to utter racial mongrelization, or rather thought this cultural degradation that afflicted the nation was a sign of creeping and insistent mongrelization. Naturally, the cause of this degradation for Rockwell was Jews, just as Hitler came to this realization in Mein Kampf.
Of both Hitler and Rockwell we can say that their sense of the political hinged a great deal on aesthetics. In the opening chapter of his 1967 book, White Power, completed shortly before his death, Rockwell lists various events and occurrences in both America and Europe as indicative of the "Death Rattle" (the title of the first chapter) of Western civilization. Most of what he describes is related, not to politics, but to art and what we might call lifestyle: homosexuality, Negro Santa Clauses, college sex orgies, popular dancing, avant-garde sculpture and painting. Rockwell, like Hitler, was not engaged merely in a political war against Jews and their minions but a cultural war against Judeo-Christian ethics, against the self-sacrificing Jewish savior who preached equality and caring for the weak, against Jewish ideas of political subversion and moral upheaval, for everything was the work of the Jews, from Dadaism to pornography, from Communism to a monetary system without specie currency, from secular humanism to the welfare state. Rockwell felt precisely as Nietzsche wrote in The Anti-Christ: "That which does not belong to our life menaces it." Every political and theological extremist believes this, and Nazis are no exception. One belongs or one is the enemy, a threat to the security and peace of the realm.
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