For decades, the Democratic Party’s foreign policy elite has struggled to seize back the mantle of patriotism from the GOP. From the Reagan era on, poll after poll suggested the American people viewed the Republican Party as stronger and fiercer in defense of national interests than the Democrats. Today, the Republican Party maintains a solid advantage over the Democratic Party (57 percent to 35 percent, in the most recent Gallup polling) on the question of which party Americans trust to “do a better job protecting the country.”
The persistence of the GOP lead on national security seems particularly baffling in the age of Donald Trump, who embraces many of the same foreign leaders who would have been (and often were) excoriated as America’s most dangerous enemies by previous Republican leaders. Trump praised Chinese Premier Xi Jinping—a “strong gentleman”—for the fact that he “runs 1.5 billion people with an iron fist.” He “fell in love” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un after Kim wrote him “a beautiful letter.” He lauded Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán as a “strong man” and a “great leader.” He called Russia’s Vladimir Putin “very much of a leader.” Pressed on Putin’s record of killing his political enemies, Trump was unperturbed: “There are a lot of killers,” Trump says. “Do you think our country is so innocent?”
How can the “America First” party give itself over to Trump, a man who offers gushing praise for so many of America’s traditional enemies? And given its adulation for Trump and his cronies, how does the GOP maintain a decisive polling advantage on issues of national security?
In America Last, Jacob Heilbrunn suggests at least a partial explanation. Patriotic rhetoric notwithstanding, the American right has often been motivated less by any “realist” conception of enduring national interests than by a deep-rooted emotional commitment to hierarchy, order, family, traditional gender roles, and some notion of racial, cultural, or religious purity. This commitment—or, if you will, this psychological proclivity—has repeatedly led the right to find common cause even with vicious foreign autocrats, provided they stand for the same things. But although embracing autocracies may seem fundamentally at odds with both American interests and democratic values, Heilbrunn asserts that “a proclivity for authoritarianism is American to its core.” At the end of the day, perhaps it is this that enables 57 percent of Americans to look at a party that celebrates brutal foreign dictators and view that as, paradoxically, an indicator of the GOP’s ability to protect the nation.
America Last offers a lively—if grim—historical tour of the American right’s fondness for foreign strongmen. Heilbrunn begins his narrative in the years leading up to World War I, when leading American intellectuals waxed eloquent in their praise of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who fostered an increasingly militarized (and anti-Semitic) elite and scorned democracy: “There is only one person who is master” in the German empire, he declared, “and I am not going to tolerate any other.”
Wilhelm, writes Heilbrunn, did more than any other European monarch to “set the twentieth century on its path to strife, bloodshed, and calamity.” In the U.S., however, “Kaiser Bill” was a popular figure to many, including the journalist and critic H.L. Mencken. Of German descent himself, Mencken, a devotee of Nietzsche, viewed democracy as “tantamount to mob rule.” In Kaiser Wilhelm’s imperial Germany, Mencken saw a “new aristocracy of genuine skill,” an “empire… governed by an oligarchy of its best men.” This adulation for German order, discipline, and hierarchy led him to oppose American entry into World War I, and argue, in an unpublished essay written for The Atlantic, that a German conquest of the United States would lead to a new utopia. (The editor of The Atlantic considered this too treasonous to print.)
From Mencken, America Last moves to the conservative poet and playwright George Sylvester Viereck. Although Viereck was ultimately jailed as a German agent during the Second World War, he was a popular and credible figure in the early years of the 20th century: In 1908, the Saturday Evening Post declared that he was “unanimously accused of being a genius,” and after the election of 1912, Teddy Roosevelt, whose presidential campaign Viereck had supported, helped him raise money for a German literary magazine. Like Mencken, Viereck opposed American entry into World War I; he saw Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany as epitomizing “the best in thought and action that has been attained among men,” particularly in contrast to the heirs of colonial American elites, who had “dissolve[d] their racial characteristics and ideals in a solution of colorless New England Puritanism.”
In the interwar years, large-scale immigration from eastern and central Europe led increasing numbers of American conservatives to decry “the influx of what were seen as inferior races that could dilute the American bloodstock.” This coincided with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and a growing right-wing enthusiasm for both eugenics and fascism. Today, it’s fashionable to accuse the right of “saying the quiet part out loud,” but America Last reminds us that not too long ago, there simply was no “quiet part.” Racism was taken largely for granted among political elites—including Woodrow Wilson, whose internationalist policies were despised by the right.
Heilbrunn highlights intellectuals such as journalist and historian Theodore Lothrop Stoddard and science fiction and horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, both avatars of this rising obsession with fascism and racial purity. Stoddard secretly advised the Klan, worried about radical Jews, and admired the Nazis; his book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, was approvingly quoted by President Warren G. Harding. Lovecraft, who viewed America’s newest immigrants as “squat yellow Mongoloids,” developed a fervent respect for Mussolini, who promised to defend Christianity and the traditional family against homosexuals, criminals, and Jews. As World War II loomed, other American conservatives cheered the success of Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces in Spain, and prominent public figures such as aviator Charles Lindbergh and industrialist Henry Ford—both unapologetic racists and anti-Semites—accepted medals from Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
The right’s fondness for foreign autocrats manifested sometimes as isolationism, sometimes as interventionism, and more recently as eager emulation. Isolationist sentiment was strong on left and right alike in the run-up to both world wars, albeit for different reasons; while the left mistrusted American militarism and sought greater focus on addressing economic inequality at home, the right simply wanted Germany and its allies left alone to evolve—and conquer—as they would. During the Second World War, intellectuals on the right became a kind of “fifth column” sapping support for the fight against fascism. Stoddard, for instance, was sent to report on Germany in 1939 by the same newspaper syndicate that employed Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; after an interview with Hitler, he enthused that “the Jewish problem” would soon be “settled… by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich.” During the Cold War, right-wing intellectuals and politicians favored direct and robust intervention on behalf of brutal dictators abroad. Most recently, in the age of Donald Trump, the right has increasingly viewed foreign autocrats as models, borrowing directly from their playbooks to advance their agenda at home.
America Last showcases many of the more revolting moments in the right’s history of autocrat worship. Heilbrunn chronicles Joseph McCarthy’s defense of Nazi war crimes; William F. Buckley’s praise for Franco (“an authentic national hero”), Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar, and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; Jeane Kirkpatrick’s support for Angola’s Jonas Savimbi; Jerry Falwell’s fondness for the leaders of South Africa’s apartheid regime; and Pat Buchanan’s praise for Hitler (“a soldier’s soldier”). Bringing us up to the present day, Heilbrunn returns to Trump and the American right’s fascination with Hungary’s Orbán. “Aggrieved, or at least disappointed, by what they perceived as their own society’s failings,” Heilbrunn writes, conservatives continue to search “for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model at home.” Recent red state efforts to ban the teaching of “gender ideology” and critical race theory are taken straight from Orbán’s playbook.
America Last is a fast-paced and readable book, full of carefully constructed vignettes and telling anecdotes, and Heilbrunn deftly details the many ways in which the right’s admiration for foreign autocrats dovetailed with authoritarian leanings here at home. Most of the public figures who populate his book also embrace anti-Semitism, anti-elitism, xenophobia, homophobia, and racism. Buckley, for instance, believed Black Africans were unfit for self-rule (“they tend to revert to savagery”) and that Black Americans (along with uneducated whites) should be denied the right to vote; today’s conservatives laud Orbán and Putin for their uncompromising hostility to transgender rights, “wokeness,” and non-white migrants, all bogeymen in the American culture wars as well.
But America Last is, in some ways, a puzzling book. The title of Heilbrunn’s book suggests we should condemn the right’s romance with foreign dictators as, among other things, inimical to U.S. foreign policy interests, but what these interests are is never clearly articulated, making it difficult to evaluate Heilbrunn’s implied claim. The thinkers profiled by Heilbrunn surely saw no contradiction between their fondness for foreign autocrats and their love for their own homeland. From their perspective, a strong America was one that pursued greater racial, religious, and gender purity at home, and sought foreign allies committed to similar paths abroad. Heilbrunn assumes readers need no explanation of why these values are inimical to American democracy—but with polls showing nearly half of Americans with a favorable opinion of Donald Trump, this no longer seems like something one can unquestioningly assume.
Similarly, Heilbrunn’s “greatest hits” list of right-wing dictator worship seems at times oddly decontextualized: He mentions organizations, policy positions, and individuals without offering much account of how they related to one another, whether and how they gained influence, how they were funded, and how and why they gained (or failed to gain) widespread popular support.
This is the least satisfying aspect of America Last. The American right bundles together a wide range of policy preferences and emotional commitments—some races or cultures are superior to others; traditional gender roles should be maintained; elites are corrupt or out of touch; the expansion of the administrative state is bad; demands for racial and economic equality are not to be trusted; nations should place their own interests first—but Heilbrunn offers no theories about why these commitments go together, whether they always do, and whether they imply anything in particular about foreign policy or the nature of national interests.
Authoritarianism can be understood both as a mode of governing and as a personality trait, but it isn’t an ideology; there have been authoritarian leaders on both the right and left. Yet although Heilbrunn acknowledges those on the left “who celebrated Stalin, Mao, and Fidel Castro,” he doesn’t explore the role (or absence) of ideology. But without grappling with ideology, we have no basis to distinguish, for instance, between the isolationism of the left and the isolationism of the right, or explain whether and how the left’s occasional romance with foreign dictators can be distinguished from the dictator worship of the right. Only a willingness to engage with ideology can begin to resolve the puzzle: To some on the left, democracy is subordinate to the pursuit of economic equality, while to many on the right, democracy is subordinate to the pursuit of more “traditional” racial, ethnic, religious, and gender hierarchies.
“This book does not argue that all conservatives are fascists or that all fascists are conservatives” or attempt “a comprehensive history of the American Right,” Heilbrunn writes. His aim, he says, is more modest: America First is intended to provide “a guide for the perplexed, identifying and tracing a persuasion—what might be called the illiberal imagination—that has persisted for over a century on the Right.” America Last is a well-researched and thought-provoking book—but by the final chapter, readers may find themselves still wondering what to make of the story Heilbrunn tells.
If the fondness for autocrats displayed by Trump and today’s GOP is merely the latest manifestation of a recurring theme within elite conservative circles, one that naturally ebbs and flows, perhaps American democracy is in less acute danger than many of us think. But there is another, darker way to read Heilbrunn’s story. Throughout the century chronicled by Heilbrunn, right-wing admirers of dictators never gained the support of a majority of American voters. Today, however, Donald Trump, an openly autocratic leader, has captured the imaginations of a far higher percentage of Americans than previous right-wing leaders even dreamed of capturing, as well as the complete fealty of the Republican Party apparatus—so perhaps the century-long right-wing assault on American democracy is finally about to succeed. Heilbrunn’s book leaves us with as many questions as answers: If America now teeters on the brink of a collapse into authoritarianism, what is it, if anything, that has changed? Is the authoritarian right simply more skillful today, or better funded, or more uniquely adept than the left at wielding the new tools offered by the rise of social media? Have economic and political changes—increased immigration, globalization, the hollowing out of the American middle class, the shift to a more multipolar international order—increased popular support for authoritarian solutions, or tapped more effectively into a pre-existing American proclivity for authoritarianism? And, most urgently, for those of us who still believe in the promise of American democracy: Is it too late to turn back the authoritarian tide?
