Friedrich Nietzsche is your new penny-farthing.

Dan McCarthy is skeptical that Nietzsche has any place in the Right's pantheon. The Reactionary Epicurean has stepped up to defend Nietzsche's diagnostic accuracy when it comes to the ills of modernity, but is the best we can say for Nietzsche that he failed to be a modernist? Paul Gottfried's Conservatism in America does a good job of debunking the New Right's paranoia about German value relativism — "Did the hippies, whom Bloom considers to be Nietzschean relativists, incite international strife among national cultures because they were ingesting Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil in addition to cannabis?” — but doesn't praise Nietzsche himself so much as he mocks his detractors.

There is, I suppose, the concern that Nietzchean conservatism will be taken to mean "Nietzschean fascism at half-speed," but this suggestive footnote to Alexander Nehamas's Art of Living opens up the possibility of reading Nietzsche as a strange kind of traditionalist:

A very interesting discussion Nietzsche’s view of the contrast between archaic Greece, where people acted as they did simply because to act that way was sanctioned by tradition, and Socrates’ radical requirement that those who followed that tradition also offer reasons for doing so can be found in Randall Havas, Nietzsche’s Genealogy: Nihilism and the Will to Knowledge. Havas’s view is engaging and important, though I am not convinced by his general conclusion that Nietzsche wanted to reestablish a culture with the authority that, according to him, archaic Greece once possessed. My own position, for which I cannot argue here, is that Nietzsche may have had the goal of establishing such a culture in his early years but that in his later works, particularly the great works of the 1880s, he ceased believing that philosophy could have such a direct influence on culture in general. He turned instead to a vastly more individualist project of self-creation, establishing himself as an individual who fashioned a distinctive, perhaps even inimitable mode of life.

The key here is the answer to this question: If we accept Nietzsche's admittedly relativistic claim that truth doesn't matter, the only standard left is [blank]. Most readers of Nietzsche think he would answer "power" (which is where fascism enters the picture); Havas thinks Nietzsche's real answer is "authority."* Nehamas and Havas disagree over whether it's the individual or culture that has the best chance of achieving this compelling aesthetic authority, but there's enough formalism, ritual and trust implicit in both of their readings to make any traditionalist feel at home. (For the place of ritualism in individualistic/anti-communitarian philosophies — it's counterintuitive, I know — see this book, which includes the sentence "Most garden parties involve more ceremony than a Latin mass.")

However, I heartily endorse McCarthy's statement that "cod Nietzscheanism" is "death metal for nerds."

* Havas: "Nietzsche means quite generally to rehabilitate the notions of obedience and authority — to make manifest what he considers to be our moral misundertanding of these notions. Such a rehabilitation is in large part what is at stake in his attack on Socratism. For from the point of view of Socratism, the sort of obedience in question in section 188 is, in fact, mere slavishness. That is to say, from the Socratic standpoint, what Nietzsche calls ‘obedience’ looks like blind, unthinking repetition, and nothing intelligible can be achieved by means of the mere repetition. If one fails to draw that distinction, it is small wonder that one cannot understand how obedience in the first sense can lead to the sort of obedience — or intelligibility — recommended by Nietzsche’s attack on the Socratic demand for reasons.”