Ronald Beiner’s Dangerous Minds is a timely little book about how we should deal with provocative thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger in the midst of the current revival of rightwing radicalism. It is aimed at a broad audience of educated readers rather than specialists on the subject, for Beiner believes that the politically sanitized version of Nietzsche and Heidegger favored by most of those specialists is blinding us to the dangerous currents that their work is now stirring up. So he takes us on a quick tour of the pronouncements of some ideological stars of what he calls the growing “neo-Fascist International”—Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Durgin, Julius Evola—and links them to core ideas in Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s thought. Beiner then develops these ideas in the book’s two main chapters, which are designed “to open our eyes, at once intellectually, politically and morally, to just how dangerous they are” (p. 14).

Beiner’s impatient and at times polemical style in this book is fueled by his assessment of the current political scene. Now that the post-war moratorium on the public expression of fascist-sounding ideals seems to be coming to an end, he believes that ignoring the plain meaning of Nietzsche’s political words is a luxury we can no longer afford. When the reductio ad Hitlerum was an effective conversation stopper, it was fun to play with friendlier and more familiar Nietzsches, the post-modern ironist or the joyful navel-gazer. Now, for Beiner, that seems like fiddling while Rome is being set ablaze.

As in the previous paragraph, I shall focus my comments in this review on Beiner’s account of Nietzsche. Not that his treatment of Heidegger is unfair or uninteresting. It is just that Nietzsche’s ideas have an immensely wider reach than Heidegger’s, both nowadays and during earlier waves of right wing radicalism. Heidegger is so much more an educated, even academic taste. You cannot imagine any army preparing a collection of his sayings for their soldiers to carry into war, as the Nazis did with Nietzsche. (The little book, designed to fit into a soldier’s knapsack, was called Sword of the Spirit: Words for German Soldiers and Strugglers.) Also, dealing with Heidegger inevitably raises questions of character—Why did he decide to join the Nazis? Why did he never really renounce them?—that deflect from Beiner’s primary focus on the dangerous implications of ideas. In this sense, the book might have done better by focusing exclusively on Nietzsche, especially given his massive influence on Heidegger.

Beiner places a rather narrow frame around Nietzsche’s ideas, following Heidegger’s suggestion that every great thinker has a “single thought.” Needless to say, that is a bit of an exaggeration. But it does help him show that Nietzsche was much more of a hedgehog than the fox you might expect from someone who tossed off thousands of wildly inconsistent aphorisms. Beiner’s frame is well-chosen: Nietzsche’s diagnosis of what he saw as the “sickness” of modern culture, a culture that systematically undermines the horizons and sense of rank that Nietzsche believes that a culture needs in order to be life-affirming. Nietzsche developed this diagnosis early in his career and spun out ever deeper variations on it for the rest of his life. It sets him squarely against both Christianity and the Enlightenment and makes him an enemy of both the open society and egalitarianism. Beiner may exaggerate the extent to which the Enlightenment’s legacy pushes us in the direction of egalitarian morals. (To my mind, the Enlightenment pushes us, both in theory and in practice, toward meritocracy and technocracy as much as or more than it pushes us toward democracy.) But Nietzsche shares Beiner’s understanding of the Enlightenment, not mine. So framing him as a fierce enemy of the Enlightenment’s commitment to egalitarianism and the open society is both accurate and useful.

But I find it hard to agree with Beiner’s conclusion that Nietzsche’s cultural diagnosis turns Nietzsche into an “ultra-reactionary,” who, like Joseph de Maistre, is looking to restore what was lost with the French Revolution. Setting Nietzsche beside someone like de Maistre, the arch-defender of Catholic orthodoxy and legitimacy, should in itself render that conclusion questionable. Opposing the Enlightenment and equality does not commit you to the restoration of something like the ancien regime unless, as Tocqueville argued so insistently, democracy and old regime aristocracy are the only two real political choices before us. But that, it seems to me, is precisely what Nietzsche—as well as many of his fellow “third way” followers—is intent on denying. Nietzsche would not only dismiss Tocqueville as another weak-willed modern seduced by Christian moralism, as Beiner suggests. He would also dismiss the confidence with which Tocqueville tells us that history has a direction, let alone which direction it is moving.

Tocqueville shared Nietzsche’s diagnosis that much of what is most valuable about individual and cultural achievement would be lost with the passing of the ancient regime. But he was reconciled to that loss by his belief that there was only one way of organizing aristocracy and that history was leaving that form of organization behind. Nietzsche shared neither belief, so he was moved to speculate about alternative ways of creating the rank, distance, and sense of closure that he believed was needed by any life-affirming culture. That these speculations proved to be so much more insubstantial than his cultural diagnoses might suggest that Tocqueville was right in the end, that Nietzsche’s dreams of a radically new form of aristocracy was a delusion. But if we are interested in the political impact of Nietzsche’s ideas, we need to consider the longing for social alternatives that he helps set in motion, not just the impracticality of his proposed cures for our cultural sickness.

That brings me back to where we started: Nietzsche’s influence on the current revival of the radical right. Beiner is certainly right to draw our attention to the Nietzschean melodies being played there and how well they echo what Nietzsche actually says, as opposed to what we would like to hear him say. But I suspect that Nietzsche’s influence may be considerably narrower than Beiner suggests. The broader movements we are seeing today seem to me much more like a “revolt of the masses”—to use Ortega y Gasset’s phrase—than the erection of some new kind of elite. In other words, they express Nietzschean ressentiment towards established cultural, intellectual and political elites much more than a longing for the creation of some new elite. When Richard Spencer proudly shouts “Hail Trump” and gets people to join him, as Beiner recounts in the opening pages of the book, it is the hatred of the elites who look down on Trump, rather than the virtues of the special few who hear the call, that sparks the most enthusiasm. “Hail Trump” is another way of saying screw you to all the right-thinking authorities his followers believe are putting them down. Spencer, Evola, Durgin, and a small number like them may eventually find a way of using disdain for elites as the fuel to promote the creation of a new and more openly disdainful form of elitism. But it seems unlikely, at least in Western Europe and North America, that they will inspire large numbers to share the devotion to “living dangerously” that Nietzsche preached.