In a retrospective look at Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, Thomas G. West interprets:

The second cause of our problems today, Bloom tells us, is post-Lockean modern philosophy. The big names are Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but their views have been popularized (and degraded) by such men as Marx, Freud, and Max Weber.

I don't trecall Bloom saying that explicitly. After all, big name Heidegger was born after those popularizers, whom he derided.

But let's keep at the cultural pathogens.

AIDS is a kind of bodily relativism, a self-destructive openness to good and evil alike. Similarly, an AIDS-infected American mind loses its ability to tell the difference between healthful and harmful opinions. Salutary customs and traditions, such as moral self-restraint and the habits and attitudes necessary for sustaining family life, for seriousness of purpose, for national survival, and for deep and intense love, become indistinguishable from life — destroying doctrines and beliefs, such as the hostile teachings of 19th and 20th century German philosophy. If Bloom is right, the American mind suffers from Hobbes-Locke induced AIDS — a liberty that has no respect for nature and natural limits. It therefore not only fails to resist the destructive infection of Nietzsche-Heidegger, but with its false openness, the American mind mindlessly welcomes the infection, thus bringing on what may be the terminal stage of the disease.

So, who's closing the American mind then? Bloom taught Nietzsche and Heidegger. Should they now be proscribed?  ¶ 9:44 PM