• How “The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart were nationalists. The Nazis took over the essence of each side in the German debate and proudly offered the synthesis as one unified viewpoint. The syntheses is: national socialism.”
• This synthesis stressed the basic principles common to all groups and served as an opening to every major segment of the population, reactionary and radical alike. At the same time, the non-Nazi parties limited themselves to a narrower, more specific consituency while alienating the rest of the country.
• The “Twenty-Five Points” document outlining the Nazi agenda: how it demanded special state action on behalf of virtually every group, with the middle class as its most obvious target of appeal. These are the white-collar workers, small tradesmen, bureaucrats, academics — those ravaged by the war and hit hardest by the hyperinfltion, and who felt pinned between government-protected cartels above and government-supported unions below.
• How the Nazis offered private deals and/or public promises to virtually every significant group in Germany to broaden their support — all the way down to the spinsters. What enabled the Nazis to offer conflicting messages tailored to appeal to each audience, flattering everyone as uniquely important, soothing concerns about their interests, promising punishment of those they felt pitted against.
• The one real consistency the Nazis offered was that of supporting and sacrificing to the “public interest” — rejecting the Weimarian mixed economy with its partial freedoms for utter totalitarianism.
• And much more…

The chapter closes by saying:

The poor hated the rich, the rich hated “the rabble,” the left hated the “bourgeoisie,” the right hated the foreigners, the traditionalists hated the new, and the young hated everything, the adults, the Allies, the West, the Jews, the cities, the “system.”

• Why Peikoff characterized art as “the barometer that lays bare a period’s view of reality, of life, of man.”
• The rise of the Expressionism movement in art with its open break with the intellect, with material reality, with all ‘middle class’ values such as work and personal success, industrial civilization, money, business, section standards, law and order, etc. The spread of these values into everything from cartoons in the newspapers, architecture, films, poetry, music.
• The Conservative reaction to this, which they regarded as a product of “reason”: turning to their traditional values of intuition and feeling with artists who portrayed an irrational, heroic, mystic world “beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in … an orgy of self-willed annihilation”.
• How the “same epistemological cause leads ultimately to the same social effect (whatever the form). The left culturati called their political ideal “socialism.” the right culturati called theirs “Prussianism.” But, as Spengler pointed out in an influential work entitled Prussianism and Socialism, there is no essential difference between these two concepts. Under both approaches, he noted, “Power belongs to the whole. The individual serves it. The whole is sovereign… Everyone is given his place. There are commands and obedience.”
• The spread of these values via the efforts of both the left and the right into the youth movements and the educational institutions.
• The effects of such emotionalism in economics: the failure in hyperinflation they would suffer as their mixed, Bismarckian-style economy drove individuals to join into pressure-group warfare.
• How this all combines into a miserable, volatile circumstance ripe for someone to deliver change and hope…

• German metaphysical idealism coming to America via the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson et. al — an eclectic “literary” version of German romanticism. Then decades of Hegel’s purified Kantianism dominating American philosophy departments.
• How some advocates of these ideas were open and clear about their rejection of reason for emotion/intuition/will, while others took the tack of presenting themselves as champions of rationality even while undercutting every essential element of it.
• How advocates of the American system of rights and capitalism tried to find ideological support in classical economics and evolutionary biology — and how this was ultimately a doomed effort because these are not philosophically fundamental. Mill, Smith, Say, and the rest of the classical economists tried to defend an individualist system while accepting the fundamental moral ideas of its opponents (altruism, collectivism). And on the biological evolution front, Herbert Spencer tried and failed to defend capitalism while adhering to more fundamental ideas which clash with it (advocating a species-based collectivist approach that would be inspiration for Eugenicists, and thinking evolution would eventually eliminate egoism in favor of altruism in humans).
• What Pragmatism is and how it became the main American manifestation of the Kantian trend.
• Why Pragmatists adopt codes of values and political ideas designed by others (non-pragmatists), usually without consciously acknowledging this, through cultural osmosis.
• How Pragmatism was the only 20th century philosophy to gain broad, national acceptance in America (and how this happened through Orwellian twists of meaning and language to sell it to an audience who would otherwise recoil). How it enjoyed a disastrous acceleration by taking over the educational system (Dewey), its prevalence in politics, etc.
• How academic philosophy then all but disappeared in America — as the “dead end” of the Kantian dichotomy between thought and reality, with the public rightly rejecting the field of philosophy as worthless (even though they nonetheless remained powerfully influenced by philosophy).
• And a lot more…

• How Obama matches and doesn’t match fascists in history — an important distinction to observe.
• The two fundamentally opposed approaches to morality.
• How Kant carried Christianity’s ethics to its climax — and how Christianity “prepared the ground” for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamental ideas in the Western mind.
• Christianity’s non-sacrificial ethical nod to Pagan egoism — and how Kant expunged this.
• How Kant felt he wasn’t an innovator in the realm of morality, but yet he was an innovator in in an important respect: actually divorcing morality from values, with moral perfection being uninterested action devoid of any love or desire.
• What evil consists in, for Kant: not self-love per-se, but giving self-love priority over morality in one’s heart. Kant’s version of Original Sin.
• How for Kant, “It is the lot of the moral man to burn with desire and then, on principle — the principle of duty — to thwart it. The hallmark of the moral man is to suffer. … It is sacrifice — sacrifice as against apathy or indifference, sacrifice continual and searing — which is the essence of Kant’s moral counsel to living men.” [p.80]
• How Kant did not preach Nazism (he likely would have frowned on the Nazis) — yet he established a necessary precondition for their development.
• The rise of the formal doctrine of Altruism, giving a target to sacrifice… Then Hegel’s development bringing ‘social relativism’ to ethics — and how the Nazis’ pragmatism dovetails with it to strengthen their sacrificial, collectivist program.
• Why physical coercion and persuasion are the only two methods for people to deal with one another — and how altruism gives the use of force a moral sanction, making it not just a practical recourse, but a positive virtue (in both secular and religious forms).
• How the many “mindless activists and nonideological brawlers” were nonetheless in the grip of a particular philosophy, morphing and rewriting their program, yet never altering the three fundamental ideas that their program rested on from start to end.
• That the world has not learned its lesson from history, with these three fundamental ideas still spreading throughout the Western world and increasing in their potency (and damage).
• And a lot more…

• The complex, centuries-long development in the history of philosophy involving dozens of figures that brought about modern German culture and its Nazi climax — boiled down to the essential turning points found in three major philosophors: Plato, Kant, and Hegel.
• Plato’s metaphysics and what it says about men, ethics, and politics — how the implications in politics mean some men must rule others.
• The fundamental contrast Aristotle offered.
• The points at when Plato’s and Aristotle’s contrasting outlooks alternately dominated cultures, and how Kant’s innovations drove the most recent transition to an essentially Platonic outlook.
• The difference between Plato and Kant — how Kant “purified” Plato epistemologically and ethically.
• How Kant and Aristotle are similar in their professed political ideas not expressing the implications of their metaphysics/epistemology (and how later thinkers in their lines went on to develop those implications).
• The role of Hegel as a post-Kantian Platonist; how he “purified” the Kant and made Plato’s totalitarian blueprint pale by comparison.
• The forms in which Hegel’s ideas propagated — Fascist Italy vs. Nazi Germany — as well as the ways in which Hegel’s ideas were secularized and made more materialistic and seemingly scientific. (Social Darwinism with Hitler, and class/economic determinism with Marx).
• And a lot more…