traditional elites (see note on the concept of elites)

The alleged undermining of the patriarchal family—the ruse of the ‘double earners’ (married women performing paid labor outside the home), and sexually liberated New Women—became a powerful symbol of the breakdown of the social fabric in the chaotic years of the Weimar Republic, subject to intense poltical debate, social policy interventions, and efforts to resurrect the traditional gender order.  The Nazis played directly on these gender anxieties as they built their movement in the Weimar years.  Together with Jews and leftists, feminists and New Women became symbols in Nazi propaganda of the decadence and weakness of liberal democracy and modern urban life.  Railing against the ‘soulless’ and ‘egotistical’ modern woman, National Socialists called for their return to the home and for the restoration of the patriarchal family—for, as the slogan went, ‘emancipation from emancipation’.

At the same time, the Nazis built upon the militarized masculinity and culture of comradship that had evolved in WWI, glorifying the ideal of a brotherhood of self-sacrificing soldier-comrades, and turning it into an extreme cult of violence, hardness, and duty to the racial Volk.  A study of the writings of the Freicorps—right-wing paramilitary groups of ex-soldiers and officers formed in the aftermath of WWI—explores the unconscious fears and desires of this fascist masculinity.  It shows the deep mysogyny of men who posssessed weak, fragmented egos, whose terrors of psychic dissolution were associated with femininization and female sexuality, and who, as a result, embraced a cult of masculine hardness and violence as an emotional defense mechanism.

Let us add at once that . . . the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered.  Indeed, divine spectators were needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight . . . .  From now on, man . . . gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him somethin were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.

 . . . ressentiment is trapped forever in the slights of the past.  . . . .  What “empowers” someone afflicted by ressentiment is the intensely focused, but impotent hatred with which he feeds his sense of having been treated unfairly, and his hope of someday forcing others to suffer in his place.

 Now let’s see how things are with people who are capable of revenge . . .  When the desire for revenge takes possession of them, they are drained for a time of every other feeling but this desire for revenge. . . . .  Now let’s look at this mouse in action.  Let’s assume it has been humiliated (it is constantly being humiliated) and that it wishes to avenge itself. . . .  The nauseating, despicable, petty desire to repay the offender in kind may squeak more disgustingly in the mouse than in the natural man who, because of his innate stupidity, considers revenge as merely justice . . . .  In its repulsive, evil-smelling nest, the downtrodden, ridiculed mouse plunges immediately into a cold, poisonous, and—most important—never-ending hatred.  For forty years, it will remember the humiliation in all its ignominious details . . .

Oh this insane, pathetic beast--man!  What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts . . .

All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses.  Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man . . . .  There is so much man that is hideous!--Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!

Indeed, this is the very basis of the Western world, with religions that profess beliefs while simultaneously disciplining bodies and purging them of their desires.

from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2008), p.p. 188-89. (Emphasis added.)

Limbaugh's attempts at gender-based "humor" are of the locker room variety.  As the California gubernatorial recall was heating up, Limbaugh informed his folowers that Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante--"whose name loosely translates into Spanish for 'large breasts'--leads the Terminator by a few pionts" (August 18, 2003).  A photomontage on the Limbaugh website shows a photograph of Schwartzenegger's head and shoulders from his Pumping Iron days as a body builder.  A naked woman has been transposed onto his shoulders.  Over her breasts is a sign reading BUSTAMONTE.  When Madonna endorsed General Wesley Clark, Limbaugh reported that she had "opened herself" to him.  Why the vulgarity in this message does not alienate the churchgoing conservatives in his audiences is a question for which we have no ready answer.

from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14