Triumph of the Will

Traditional fascists were obsessed with the "will" or "will to power," drawing on Nietzche (and arguably misinterpreting him). Not clear if that concept matters much to American fascism.

Not clear to me what it is, this "will." Some quotes from Wikipedia :

> The "fascist" Nietzsche was above all considered to be a heroic opponent of necrotic Enlightenment "rationality" and a kind of spiritual vitalist, who had glorified war and violence in an age of herd-lemming shopkeepers, inspiring the anti-Marxist revolutions of the interwar period. According to the French fascist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, it was the Nietzschean emphasis on the autotelic power of the Will that inspired the mystic voluntarism and political activism of his comrades.

Mussolini:

> Finally, fascism is a religious concept that sees Man in his sublime relationship with a law and a will that transcend the individual. For fascism, the world is not the material world that appears on the surface, where man is an individual isolated from all others, existing in himself, and governed by a law that leads him to live only a life of selfish, momentary pleasure. Fascism was born of a reaction against the present century and against degenerate, agnostic materialism.

American fascism is too hedonistic to talk like Mussolini? "Selfish momentary pleasure" is our *thing*.

> In *The Will to Power* Nietzsche praised – sometimes metaphorically, other times both metaphorically and literally – the sublimity of war and warriors, and heralded an international ruling race that would become the "lords of the earth". Here Nietzsche was referring to pan-Europeanism of a Caesarist type [...] not a Germanic master race but a neo-imperial elite of culturally refined "redeemers" of humanity, which was otherwise considered wretched and plebeian and ugly in its mindless existence.