For the Love of Dictators

Heilbrunn, Jacob.  America Last:  The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

        n.p.: Liveright, 2024.  ISBN: 9781324094661

 

 

Everyone alive knows that Donald Trump seems enthralled with Putin and Ron DeSantis with Victor Orban. What about dictators is so attractive to a certain mindset?  And when did this obsession become a passion of the Conservatives?  These are some of the issues that Jacob Heilbrunn seeks to clarify in America Last.

 

Jacob Heilbrunn lays out early in the opening of the book his relationship with the conservative movement to establish his credentials for the history he reveals.  He starts with the present day where the conservatives and many Republicans seem to think that Hungary and its culture wars is the future they should pursue.  So how and when did this "homage to authoritarianism" develop?  

 

So who all has the Right praised?   "Kaiser Bill" for one was praised by Henry Louis Mencken and George Sylvester Viereck as an upholder of traditional values.  Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, and H. P. Lovecraft adored Benito Mussolini, the Fascist ruler of Italy.  Ezra Pound was another vocal advocate of both Mussolini and later Adolf Hitler.  Elizabeth Dilling was a fascist supporter who accused the YMCA and the League of Women Voters as communist front organizations and college campuses as "hotbeds of radicalism."  Then there was the America First Committee that openly support Germany with the assistance of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, the return of George Sylvester Viereck, and the funding of William Randolph Hearst.  After the war, came the era of McCarthy with the Senator hunting for "dirty Commies" everywhere while working on rehabilitating Nazi Germany.  

 

In the 1950's Henry Luce and his wife Clara Booth Luce helped lead the charge against the U.S. State Department while fawning over Nationalist China's ruler, Chiang Kaishek.  About this time William F. Buckley wandered on to the stage praising McCarthy while pushing a shift from isolationism to confronting the Communist menace through The National Review.  However, Buckley, his brother-in-law Leo Bozell, Jr., and others also looked to Franco of Spain, and Salazar of Portugal for inspiration in opposing the rise of Liberalism in America.  Then there was the Kirkpatrick doctrine which provided cover for the Right to cozy up with authoritarian governments such as Pinochet, South Africa, El Salvador, and Argentina.  

In 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Right lost a major focus.  Patrick Buchanan started the charge of the new "Old Right" back to isolationism that puts America first leading to a fight between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives that is still going strong.  He voiced strong opposition to George H. W. Bush in regard to the Gulf War, to the U.S. sending troops to Bosnia, and was warmly embraced by Russian presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky for his stance on Jews.  Then came 9/11 and the launch of the War on Terror.  In George W. Bush, the neocons had a champion to try out their ideas in Afghanistan and then Iraq.  The ultimate failure of the neocon plans provided the opportunity for the paleocons to come roaring back in the unlikely person of Donald J. Trump who made no secret of his love of authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin.  Even Putin's invasion of Ukraine in flagrant defiance of treaties that Russia has signed has not slowed the love of dictators found in the Right today.  It is amazing/appalling how many people have fallen in love with a nostalgic picture of a time that never was.

Jacob Heilbrun provides a very detailed schooling on the love for authoritarians that seem crafted into the DNA of the conservative Right in America.  So if you want to know the background to the news stories of today, take the time to read America Last.