ROUGHLY A year ago, James Ceaser interpreted George XV. Bush's post-September 11 foreign policy rhetoric as a direct attack on Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophic legacy--a legacy that ironically finds its most vocal contemporary cheerleaders on the Left, which Nietzsche despised.1 In calling evil by its name, wrote Ceaser, the President was engaging in what amounted to a broad assault on the dishwatery moral relativism that (post)modem liberalism clumsily drew from the pages of Nietzsche's writing.
This is completely correct. As a man who identified Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, President Bush is the natural antithesis to a philosopher who gleefully described himself as the Antichrist, as well as to those liberals who today peddle misunderstandings of Nietzsche as moral dogmas. The President and his administration detest nihilistic destructiveness; they do not worship the will to power. They are certainly attackers of Nietzsche misunderstood, but perhaps they share something in common with Nietzsche properly understood. Obvious interpretive errors aside, shades of similarity do seem to exist between the Bush Administration's approach to foreign policy and Nietzsche's approach to philosophy.
The Dawn
The greatest events and thoughts--the greatest thoughts, however, are the greatest events--are longest in being comprehended: the generations which are contemporary with them do not experience such events--they live past them.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
