As I mentioned in the first post, I'm more familiar with Nietzsche's work and biography than Heidegger's. And, their influence is such that it would be both historically inaccurate and politically confused to relegate Nietzsche and Heidegger as relevant only to the political right.
But Baker's description of both as political reactionaries is a fair characterization, though neither is particularly known for their political theories as such. It wasn't an emphasis for either of them, though Nietzsche's work does touch on issues relevant to political theory in many places. Baker identifies what he sees as the common frame of reference for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, drawing on the book he's reviewing by Ronald Beiner:
In Beiner’s hands, Nietzsche and Heidegger become, first and foremost, reactionary cultural critics. Their project originates in a howl of dismay at the modern world, and especially the ideals of the French Revolution. Liberty, equality, and fraternity have been a catastrophe. What came advertised as emancipatory proved to be spiritually deadening. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on democracy and innate human rationality has spawned an epidemic of arrogant mediocrity. Ordinary people vastly overestimate their capacity to reason, to know things, and to use their knowledge to improve the world. A mass society, in which all distinctions have been leveled away, is also one that has lost its sense of the tragic, of a world that must be accepted rather than changed. We need a new authority, one capable of revitalizing our culture, of restoring the order whose absence has so crippled the modern spirit. You have to break some eggs to make the existential omelet.Karl Löwith (1897-1973), who I also mentioned in the first post, was the author of From Hegel to Nietzsche (1939). He wrote in Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Church History 13:3 (Sept 1944) framed the problem of viewing the later political results of Nietzsche's philosophical work this way, which mostly avoids any reliance on more-than-dubious notions of "national scharacter":
What is peculiar ... to German philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche is its radicalism, the courage to dig remorselessly for the roots of things and to draw the ultimate conclusions. Nobody realized better than Nietzsche himself that it was the "magic of the extreme" which was fighting for him. "We do not need any allies, not even lies, for we seduce by the mere force of being extreme." Ruthlessness of intellect can be admirable and even most moral, while ruthlessness of character and action is detestable. Both are, however, peculiar to the Germans, for they are radical even in the practical application of abstract principles. And that is the point where Nietzsche and the Germans came to agree with each other. The transition, however, from Nietzsche's philosophical design to its political application, which necessarily implies distortion and simplification, was neither in the hands of the designer nor in that of the builders. Such a process is effected by history which always embraces both: thinkers as well as actors, promoters as well as opponents, conformists as well as objectors, all together responsible for what they intended, and not responsible for what they achieved, for the ways by which ideas as well as actions become historically effective are unpredictable and beyond our intentions. Granted that Nietzsche prepared the way for the German revolution, one must also grant him that all path-makers prepared the way for others, just because they did not walk that way themselves. [my emphasis]Heidegger's relationship to Nazism is easier to define, because he was literally a Nazi. But even there, relating his existential philosophy to specific features of Nazi ideology and practice is a challenge. Even scientists and scholars can be downright boneheaded about matters outside their specific fields of expertise. Werner von Braun didn't need a clean political conscience to make the rockets fly.
Nietzsche was one of the main targets of an Anglo-Saxon view of Germany philosophy that owed a lot to the animosities of the two world wars, known as the "From Luther to Hitler" viewpoint, the title of a 1941 book by William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy. Because Nietzsche was not Jewish, the Nazis used slective quotations to make Nietzsche and other famous German figures sound like proto-Nazis.
The philosopher Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980) made it his scholarly project to rehabilite German philosophy in the English-speaking world from the from-Luther-to-Hitler bubble. He made Nietzsche part of that project, and his 1950 biography Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) did a lot to make his work more accessible for the English-speaking audience. A key problem for Nietzsche's reception was that when he became mentally ill in the later part of his life, his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, became his guardian and controlled his papers. She was a hardcore anti-Semite and fan of the German-nationalist and racist völkisch movement. She and her husband became part of a crackpot völkisch utopian community type project in Paraguay, which quickly failed. She complied the book The Will to Power from excerpts of Nietzsche's work, arranged to be supportive of her viewpoint. As the novelist Leon Uris later wrote, Nietzsche himself was not an anti-Semite. But his harsh way of expressing his criticisms of Judaism made it awfully easy to quote him out of context. Which is what Förster-Nietzsche did.
Nietzsche started his academic career as a philologist focused on classical Greek and Roman texts. He was well acquainted with the cutting-edge critical German Biblical scholarship of his time. One of his closest friends was the Protestant theologian Franz Overbeck (1837–1905). Nietzsche developed a philosophical-psychological account of the development of Judaism and Christianity as deriving from a slave morality which took the values of the ancient nobility and inverted them. Values that reinforced the position of the ancient rulers were redefined as evil, while values supporting slaves and the lower classes were defined as virtues. He credited the ancient Jews with developing the concept of evil, arguing that while the ancient aristocracy distinguished between good and bad, the slave morality began to distinguish between good and evil. He viewed Christianity as a qualitative intensification of the slave morality of the Jews.
Nietzsche himself in his writing adopted a position of defending the aristocratic view against the slave morality. And this was a fundamentally reactionary stance in 19th century Germany. He explicitly criticized the notions of democracy and equality, which he regarded as the product of the slave morality. And most of his work was done in a flamboyant, polemical style.
But what he was doing was anything but village atheism. It was a sophisticated interpretation and reading of religious history based on the scholarship avaialble to him. And it's pretty obvious that seeing Judaism and Christianity as expressing the rebellion of the oppressed and deprived has a historical basis. Moses leading the Exodus out of Egypt is the foundational event for the Jewish faith. The Resurrection of Jesus, the advocate for the poor, plays that role in the Christian religion. Adherents of both faiths were taking inspiration from Jewish and Christian ideas to reject the values and oppressive actions of the powerful long before Nietzsche or 20th century Liberation Theology.
Nietzsche polemicized against Judaism. The Christianity that he saw as an intensification of the Judaism's slave morality drew even more pointed criticism from him.
But if Nietzsche was more hostile to Christianity than to Judaism, the group to which he directed his most intense polemics was the anti-Semites of his time. He broke off his onetime friendship with the composer Richard Wagner specifically over Wagner's embrace of anti-Semitism. He basically thought the German anti-Semites associated with the völkisch movement were the scum of the earth. (How much he may have exempted his sister from that judgment, I don't know.)
That alone makes portraying him as a proto-Nazi very problematic.
Löwith argues that Nietzsche recognized the catastrophic direction of political developments in the world: "The time of petty-states is over. The twentieth century, Nietzsche prophesied, will bring the compulsion to great imperialistic politics for the dominion of the globe."
There are many features of Nietzsche's thought beside what I'm describing here, such as his concepts of the Overman, the will to power, eternal recurrence, the death of God, and his polemics against the socialism of Eugene Dühring. (It's worth noting that Dühring in his later life became a blatant anti-Semite.)
One of the big contraditions in Nietzsche's life and thought is that his wrting doesn't provide much that's useful on the subject of gender roles and women's rights. Walter Kaufmann thought the best we could say about Nietzsche's writing on women is that it was shallow. What makes this particularly ironic is that Nietzsche was also close friends with Lou Andreas Salomé (1861-1937), a pioneering feminist writer and one of the most intriguing women of the 19th and 20th centuries. She was the subject of a film released in 2018, Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free. Nietzsche was in love with her and even proposed to her.
Lou later was personally trained by Sigmund Freud as a psychoanalyst. Freud's daughter Anna, an important psychoanalyst herself, became Lou's lifelong friend. She thus became a very personal link between Nietzsche and Freudian psycholanalysis. The early psychoanalysts say Nietzsche's philosophical ideas on the influence of unconscious drives and motivations as an important predecessor to psychoanalysis. Eva Cybulska writes about this in Psychoanalysis & Philosophy (II)
Philosophy Now! 2008.
One last point here about Nietzsche's philosophical influence. He is generally considered a major influence in postmodernist philosophy. (Rainer Friedrich, The Enlightenment Gone Mad (I): The Dismal Discourse Of Postmodernism's Grand Narratives Arion 19:3; Winter 2012) But postmodernism is a major bogeyman of the alt-right. Some of whose advocates claim to be drawing ideas from Nietzsche. Another reminder that putting Nietzsche into a 2019 political category is tricky business.
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