The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger, characterized "Americanism," by this time an abstract concept, as "the still unfolding and not yet full or completed essence of the emerging monstrousness of modern times." According to Heidegger, Europe (chiefly Germany) was caught in a "great pincer," squeezed by the modernist ideologies of Americanism and Bolshevism, which, despite their differences, represented from "a metaphysical point of view, the same dreary technological frenzy and the same unrestricted organization of the average man."

In the contemporary European intellectual critique of America, by contrast, the force threatening Europe derives from religion, with the pincer squeezing Europe coming from the two fundamentalisms. Although many European thinkers still take America to task for being too modern in certain realms, the main charge today is that America is not modern enough--that it adheres to an anachronistic concept of the nation, that it still expresses a belief in a principle of natural rights, and that it is not embarrassed to rely on religion. Meanwhile, European culture and politics have moved on to embrace a post-religious ethos, in which even the slightest mention of the Almighty in an official public address is seen as fatally compromising the practice of true democratic politics.

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