The Autocratic Allure

Ever since the New Deal, American liberals have shown a remarkable ability to forget about the American right. In 1950, the social critic Lionel Trilling famously declared victory for liberalism, dismissing conservative ideas as nothing more than “irritable mental gestures.” The subsequent rise of McCarthyism, massive resistance against civil rights, and the John Birch Society all called that assumption into question—but when Lyndon Johnson defeated the archconservative Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, final victory was declared once again. Then Richard Nixon got elected. When he resigned, Democrats were certain that Republicans and conservatives had been vanquished for a generation. Then along came Ronald Reagan a mere six years later.

Reagan’s decisive victory made it harder to argue that conservatism and Americanism were truly incompatible. Still, many people assumed that certain ideas—explicit racism, “America first” nativism—had forever been relegated to the political fringe. That’s part of why Donald Trump caught liberals off guard; his popularity violated core assumptions about what Americans believed and how they were supposed to behave in the twenty-first century. Even now, after one Trump victory and a nail-biter follow-up, it seems hard to believe that American voters could really put him back in power. The left might view much of U.S. history as a saga of oppression, from settler colonialism to slavery and Jim Crow to immigration exclusion. But it’s entirely different to realize that a vast swath of your fellow citizens apparently still supports some of those ideas.

Historians have periodically tried to point out that conservative and far-right ideas have their own history, genealogy, and staying power. In the mid-1990s, Alan Brinkley prodded fellow scholars of history to explain—not just to denounce—the conservative surge that produced Reagan. After Trump’s election, the historian Rick Perlstein published a mea culpa in The New York Times Magazine, lamenting that the “professional guardians of America’s past,” in attempting to live up to Brinkley’s dictum, had “advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump.” Since then, scholars and journalists have tried to correct the record, producing a wealth of new studies of the John Birch Society, homegrown fascism, the Ku Klux Klan, and other avatars of the far right. Jefferson Cowie’s Freedom’s Dominion, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for history, told “a saga of white resistance to federal power” as it unfolded in one Alabama county.

So far, most attempts to create a genealogy for today’s right have focused on domestic politics. As a result, they have neglected one of the most notable and troubling aspects of the Trump political brand: his embrace of foreign authoritarian leaders not merely as geopolitical allies but also as models for how to live the good life. Inside the Beltway, foreign policy experts have sounded the alarm about Trump’s chest-thumping, dictator-loving style as an assault on democratic norms, out of step with American tradition and reason and the ways things are done. But as the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn points out in his punchy and engaging new book, America Last, Trump’s America-first proclivities—including his admiration for foreign strongmen—have their own history. Once upon a time, those ideas occupied the fringes, alarming for their content but not necessarily for their influence. Today, they are going mainstream.

DEVOTED TO DICTATORSHIP

Heilbrunn came of age with the post–Cold War establishment. He began his career in 1989 at The National Interest, the house organ of the then flourishing neoconservative movement. During the Clinton administration, he became a staffer at The New Republic (arguably more neoliberal than neoconservative at the time), before returning to The National Interest in 2008 and eventually becoming its editor. From that vantage point, Heilbrunn has been both witness to and critic of an emerging far-right subculture organized around the veneration of Russian President Vla­dimir Putin and Hungarian President Viktor Orban. At The New Republic, Heilbrunn coined the term “theocon” to describe the hierarchical, isolationist, overtly Christian orientation that seemed to be catching on with a new generation of Republican leaders. Even so, like many Washington insiders, he did not quite see Trump coming.

Once Trump arrived, however, Heilbrunn recognized the type. “The longer I’ve listened to conservatives today talk about Hungary, Russia, ‘wokeness,’ ‘the deep state,’ abortion, immigration, and media bias, the more I’ve become convinced that many of their arguments are not novel,” he writes. “If anything, the opposite is true: these arguments represent an act of conservation, preserving in a kind of rhetorical alembic grievances and apprehensions that can be traced all the way back to World War I.” America Last is Heilbrunn’s effort to describe how the United States got from there to here, thanks to a wild array of far-right intellectuals, politicians, and would-be tyrants.

Based on the book’s subtitle—“the right’s century-long romance with foreign dictators”—one might assume that America Last addresses a familiar subject: how the U.S. government, acting with a nearly limitless view of the national interest, got into bed with dictators and demagogues throughout the twentieth century. But Heilbrunn is not interested in (or, perhaps, troubled by) moral compromises made for geopolitical reasons. He seeks instead to describe a dark history of Americans’ admiration for brutal, often racist authoritarians abroad, from Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II on up to the apartheid government of South Africa. “The tradition this book excavates is not based on realism or pragmatism,” Heilbrunn writes. “It is rooted, rather, in a sincere affinity. Its advocates avow, or at least intimate, that authoritarianism, in one form or other, is superior to democracy.” A realist might accept entangling alliances with dictators as the least of the available evils. Heilbrunn’s characters celebrate the evil itself.

The book begins with World War I, the first European continental war to lure the United States into a major mobilization. President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war in 1917 unleashed an outpouring of anti-German sentiment at home, from the ridiculous (sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage”) to the truly repressive (laws against “disloyal” speech and internment camps for suspicious German nationals). But as Heilbrunn points out, there were at least a few voices on the American right supporting the Kaiser as a model of nationalist vision and masculine power. Heilbrunn does not share their sentiments. The Kaiser, he writes, was “a monster” who “set the twentieth century on its path to strife, bloodshed, and calamity.” Heilbrunn nonetheless tries to explain what the Kaiser’s admirers seemed to like and how they built a story in which Germany was a geopolitical victim rather than an aggressor. Although these ideas were unpopular during the war itself, the disappointing settlement at Versailles gave them some traction in the years that followed. According to Heilbrunn, the Kaiser’s rehabilitation helped produce “many of the arguments that future generations of American apologists for authoritarian leaders would deploy.”

What were those arguments? They were, for starters, antidemocratic—committed to a hierarchical worldview in which some people counted more than others and in which the “great leader” (whoever he might be at any given moment) counted the most of all. Beyond that, Heilbrunn’s ideologues did not always agree. Some openly championed elite rule, while others claimed to be channeling the will of the people. Some were deeply Catholic, while others scorned the pretensions of both church and state. Some advocated a strong central government; others, a libertarian paradise. For some, such as the pernicious race theorist Lothrop Stoddard, it was defending the color line that mattered most. For others, it was the fight to protect traditional Christianity, or patriarchal families, or even just the idea of hierarchy itself.

These figures nonetheless found a common set of dictators to admire. Heilbrunn’s most effective chapters document the deep American fascination with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler beginning in the 1920s and extending well beyond the moment when the true depredations of their regimes were widely known. As Heilbrunn notes, several leading figures of the modern conservative movement, including the publisher Henry Regnery, started out as apologists for Hitler, far preferring his anticommunism, hypernationalism, and racism to a joint antifascist front with Joseph Stalin. Hitler returned the compliment. As the legal scholar James Whitman pointed out in his 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model, the Nazi regime looked to the Jim Crow system and to the United States’ robust supply of eugenic theorists as inspiration for its racial order.

ANTI-ELITE IVY LEAGUERS

With the end of World War II, the boundaries of the far-right authoritarian tradition identified by Heilbrunn become somewhat fuzzier. The U.S. government itself embraced the anti-Stalinist position, allying with almost anyone who cared to agree. Far from being a language reserved for the far right, anticommunism became the lingua franca of American politics. Still, there were variations. Heilbrunn rightly includes Joseph McCarthy as one of his Trumpian precursors, less because the Wisconsin senator opposed communism than because he expressed that opposition in a distinctively right-wing way. For McCarthy, as for many of his heirs, the problem was not just the Communist Party or the Soviet Union but also the entire complex of liberal elites, fancy-university professors, and administrative-state bureaucrats who stood in the way of a Cold War victory.

Nobody made more out of that constellation of ideas than William F. Buckley, the wunderkind of the midcentury conservative movement. Buckley got his start by denouncing his alma mater as a bastion of socialist, anti-Christian indoctrination in his 1951 book, God and Man at Yale. He then went on to back McCarthy as an embattled American hero, someone uniquely equipped, in Heilbrunn’s words, to vanquish “the gatekeepers of the 1950s consensus society—the Ivy League intellectuals, the Wall Street bankers, the liberal media.” In 1955, in the wake of McCarthy’s downfall, Buckley founded National Review, convinced that others would have to take up the struggle against a treacherous, soft-on-communism elite.

Over the next several decades, National Review would endorse a true parade of horribles: Francisco Franco of Spain, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, the apartheid governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. The magazine would also perfect an all-too-recognizable version of the conservative political style. “Trolling the libs, denouncing political correctness, and overthrowing the deep state—all had their sources in Buckley’s early efforts,” Heilbrunn writes.

Like Buckley, a surprising number of Heilbrunn’s subjects come out of the Ivy League, especially Harvard and Yale (with Columbia a distant third). This overrepresentation may have something to do with Heilbrunn’s process of selection, which seems to run toward quirky high-born pseudo-intellectuals. But there is also something notable about the Ivy League dissident as a right-wing political type. Today’s politics are filled with Ivy-educated men who love nothing so much as to denounce liberal elites and the universities that employ them. Think of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (Yale), Senators J. D. Vance and Josh Hawley (both Yale Law), the former Republican presidential primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (Yale Law again), and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (who has not one but two Yale degrees). Or even Trump, the fine product of a University of Pennsylvania education and now the great foe not only of left-wing campus activists but also of the entire enterprise of factual expertise and truth-seeking.

Heilbrunn relates some bizarre stories of what can happen when this sense of insider grievance goes awry. One is the tale of Buckley’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, Jr., who received his bachelor’s and law degrees from Yale and seemed well on his way to a nice life of National Review–style elite-bashing. Then, in 1965, he moved to Franco’s Spain, where he increasingly embraced a high-Catholic theocratic worldview. On returning to the United States, he threw himself into the militant antiabortion movement, helping to organize one of its first major demonstrations in Washington in 1970. At that protest, he assaulted a police officer with a five-foot wooden cross and had to be dragged off in handcuffs, all while shouting in Spanish, “Long live Christ the King!”

FRINGE NO MORE

Of course, there is at least one major difference between Bozell and Trump. Bozell was a marginal figure, widely known in conservative circles but otherwise profoundly obscure. Trump has already been president of the United States and may soon get the job again. In that sense, the key thing to be explained about Heilbrunn’s genealogy of far-right sentiment is not simply the fact that it exists. What really matters—and what distinguishes the present moment from most of what is described in America Last—is that these ideas have eventually captured a U.S. president, along with one of the country’s two major political parties.

This unlovely circumstance is what inspired Heilbrunn’s exploration. And yet the book itself pays little attention to the question of influence or power. Heilbrunn generally avoids assessing the relative position of his subjects and the ways in which their ideas did or did not enter the mainstream. “His antipathy was widely shared,” he writes of the antidemocratic businessman Merwin Kimball Hart—but how widely? Of President Franklin Roosevelt’s critics, Heilbrunn maintains that “more than a few were pro-fascist”—but how many? Heilbrunn might be forgiven for leaning vague on such questions, since quantifying influence or legacy is notoriously difficult. The result, however, is that readers have little sense of change over time, as if the history of far-right sentiment in foreign policy has been a seamless and unchanging journey.

In truth, for most of the era that Heil­brunn describes, those sentiments were deeply out of fashion—real, to be sure, but hardly drivers of policy. A handful of prominent Americans may have liked the Kaiser during World War I, but the real problem of illiberalism on the home front had more to do with Wilson’s repressive policies than with pro-Germanism. During the 1930s and 1940s, the isolationist aviator Charles Lindbergh and his supporters did admire Hitler and Mussolini, but the U.S. government mobilized the nation’s blood and treasure in an entirely different direction. The only real precedent for the current moment may be the Reagan administration, when many of the characters Heilbrunn describes got their first taste of actual power. Within weeks of his election, Reagan was poring over Buckley’s personnel recommendations, seeking out appointees, in Reagan’s words, “whose philosophy is akin to ours.” Reagan recruited beyond National Review circles as well. The neoconservative political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick—whose 1979 Commentary article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” made the case that Washington should cozy up to right-wing autocrats—became his ambassador to the UN.

By most measures, Reagan and Trump have little in common when it comes to foreign policy. Whatever one might think of his approach, Reagan was a true believer in American exceptionalism and in the persuasive power of the U.S. model. Trump describes an America in decline, the laughingstock of the world. According to Trump, Putin’s Russia at least has some of the dignity and strength and self-respect that a great nation deserves. Heilbrunn’s book shows that Trump is not the first person to make such claims—that when it comes to foreign dictators, as in so many other matters, Trump is mostly borrowing bad ideas. Perhaps inadvertently, however, America Last also underscores why the twentieth century was actually quite different from the twenty-first—and why it feels as if the United States is now heading into uncharted territory.