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• America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators - 2024 Liveright, New York, NY

• The National Interest website - https://cftni.org/expert/jacob-heilbrunn/

  JACOB HEILBRUNN
  Editor

  Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of The National Interest, a foreign policy magazine that was founded by Irving Kristol in 1985. He began his career as an assistant editor at the magazine, where his first issue was the one featuring Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” essay. He went on to become a senior editor at the New Republic and an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel.

  In 1994 he was an Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Berlin, Germany. In 1996 he was a Japan Society Fellow in Tokyo, where he studied Japanese nationalism. In 2007 he won the George F. Kennan Award for commentary on German-American relations. In 2008 his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the 100 notable books of the year by The New York Times.

Heilbrunn, Jacob AMERICA LAST Liveright/Norton (NonFiction None) $28.99 2, 20 ISBN: 9781324094661

The authoritarian right's love of dictators is a feature, not a bug--and one with a long history.

Heilbrunn, editor of the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right, examines contemporary groups such as the Heritage Foundation with a gimlet eye, critical of their obeisance to nationalist rulers such as Hungary's Viktor Orbán. "How," he asks, "had a small, landlocked country--with half the population of Florida and dependent on economic subsidies from Brussels--emerged as a model for the proud American Right, those supposed believers in American exceptionalism?" It's a good question, but also one that could have been raised from the time of the Federalists. The attraction of like to like, of nationalist to nationalist, supremacist to supremacist, is a theme in American history--and, Heilbrunn adds, "a proclivity for authoritarianism is American to its core." That authoritarianism, as the title bespeaks, holds modern, multicultural, multiethnic America in disdain. It allows a Donald Trump to hope for the country's economic collapse, and it allows other right-wingers to expound on the idea that the U.S. is a republic and not a democracy. In fact, Heilbrunn argues, the republican features of small-r republican America were put in place to hinder mob rule. Conservative icons such as H.L. Mencken and Henry Regnery are called into question for their support of Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I, and later ideological heirs such as Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlin for their undisguised admiration of the Third Reich. In more recent times, Heilbrunn notes, their nationalism has taken the form of anti-Semitism and, today, pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian posturing--to say nothing of J.D. Vance's call to "fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state" precisely to emulate "what Orbán has done."

A sweeping, well-argued condemnation of the right-wing penchant for totalitarianism.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Heilbrunn, Jacob: AMERICA LAST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784238590/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c0097aa8. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

• The American Conservative
  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/facts-last-jacob-heilbrunn-returns-to-the-neocons/
  Word count: 1165

  Jacob Heilbrunn Returns to the Neocons
  The National Interest editor’s latest volume lacks both the tenability and generosity of his first. But he’s been nothing but rewarded.

  Former President Trump Holds Event In South Carolina To Announce His Presidential Campaign Leadership Team For SC
  (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
  helen
  Helen Andrews
  Mar 30, 2024
  12:05 AM
  America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, Jacob Heilbrunn, Liveright, 264 pages

  Jacob Heilbrunn’s first book was an attack on a faction of the right, and so is this one. The difference is that his earlier book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (2008), was tempered by a grudging admiration for its subjects. The neocons were Heilbrunn’s sort of people, with whom he shared a sensibility, a demographic background, and professional connections. He feels no such fondness for the populists described in America Last. The tone of the book is one of unrelenting contempt.

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  Vituperation is the book’s biggest weakness. Abusive language abounds. Supporters of President Donald Trump are called “lackeys,” criticism of American policy is called “self-abasement before foreign tyrants,” opponents of open borders are credited with “simple hatred for migrants.” This editorializing tone would be forgivable if Heilbrunn made a solid case for his argument, based on facts, but he does not. He fails to draw any distinction between, for example, respectfully engaging with Hungary’s popular head of state and having “a man-crush on Orbán.” Can an American be curious about Fidesz’s domestic accomplishments without being a starstruck fanboy? The entire thesis of Heilbrunn’s book rests on a refusal to see any difference between the two.

  Heilbrunn sees admiration for foreign strongmen as the primary motivation for conservative policy positions. On the Ukraine war, he writes, “The complaint about NATO was not about foreign policy realism. It was rooted in real admiration for Putin—for his disdain for LGBTQ rights, for his support for the Russian Orthodox church, and for his cult of masculinity.” In support of his contention, he cites an old column of Pat Buchanan’s and a few offhand remarks by Tucker Carlson about Putin, such as “He’s not Adolph Hitler.” (Does that qualify as admiration?) He ignores the literally millions of words published in this magazine alone explaining the folly of NATO expansion, not in terms of good guys and bad guys, but in terms of costs and benefits for each side of the conflict—small benefits for America, massive costs for Russia—and the likely result of this imbalance of interests.

  Attempts to discredit foreign policy realism in this way are based on emotion, not reason. In 2019, journalist Bari Weiss, then still working at the New York Times, appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a skeptic of Syrian intervention, “She’s an Assad toady.” When Rogan asked her, “What does that mean? What’s a toady?” Weiss replied, “I think I used that word correctly. Jamie, can you check what ‘toady’ means? ‘T-O-A-D-I-E.’ I think it means what I think it means.” She connected the congresswoman to the Syrian dictator using a word she could neither define nor spell. It was a slur, not an argument.

  Heilbrunn can spell “toady” correctly, but otherwise the ploy is the same. The test is simple: Is there any imaginable objective assessment of Vladimir Putin’s leadership, one that tallies the pluses and minuses as dispassionately as possible without proceeding from facts to moral judgment, that Heilbrunn would not deride as the work of a Putin-lover? There is not. We know this because a preeminent example of such an assessment, Christopher Caldwell’s 3,000-word essay in Hillsdale College’s magazine Imprimis, “How to Think About Vladimir Putin,” is enough to put Caldwell on Heilbrunn’s list of America Lasters. Does Heilbrunn not see the danger in walling off vitally important topics from rational analysis? Is America likely to make better decisions if debate is conducted in the hysterical tone he advocates rather than the pragmatic tone Caldwell exemplifies?

  The book projects this putative right-wing love of dictators back over a century of political history. Heilbrunn opens his story with World War I and continues through the rise of fascism up to the Cold War and beyond. The biggest weakness of these historical chapters is a fixation on minor characters. Was Merwin K. Hart really such a titan that his name deserves to appear almost a hundred times in America Last? Lonnie Lawrence Dennis was a mixed-race Harvard graduate who chose to pass as white and left a diplomatic career to become a public speaker and author of such right-wing books as The Coming American Fascism. A fascinating story, no doubt, but does Heilbrunn really believe that any conservative alive today was influenced wittingly or unwittingly by Dennis’s example? If not, then in what sense is he evidence of a “long-standing tradition” to which Donald Trump also belongs?

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  The thinness of Heilbrunn’s case has not stopped the book from being a media sensation. He has had promotional interviews on MSNBC and CNN where he has publicized his fear that Trump “fetishizes the strongman” and represents “creeping fascism” and “a new world order based on tyranny.” His book is popular among many of the same journalists who promoted the Russiagate hoax, which Heilbrunn to this day endorses. He claims that Trump in 2016 “was plotting against America—with the not inconsiderable help of Russian president Vladimir Putin” and refers to “the so-called Russia hoax, which was none at all.”

  Clearly there is an appetite for public intellectuals who will argue, in the face of all exonerating evidence and common sense, that Trump is a Russian agent. It’s a living, I guess. But what’s good for Heilbrunn’s career is bad for the republic. Tearing down Trump on this false basis will have the effect, among others, of strengthening the same foreign policy establishment that brought us the Iraq war, the Libyan intervention, and other costly errors. Ironically, few people know better than Heilbrunn, the one-time dissector of the neocons, how much damage that establishment has done to American interests.

  Heilbrunn ended his 2008 book with a prediction that, despite all of their manifest errors, the neocons would maintain their hold on the conservative movement because the young people were on their side. “Unlike the neoconservatives, the realists have cultivated no successor generation,” he wrote. “There has been no real attempt to create new generations of realists to replace the Scowcrofts and Bakers and Schlesingers.” How different the scene looks today. The young talent is “behind populism and nationalism, and it is the NeverTrumpers whose ranks are notably gray.

• Washington Monthly
  https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/02/20/one-hundred-years-of-dictator-worship/
  Word count: 2422

  One Hundred Years of Dictator Worship
  For the past century, the American right has fawned over foreign autocrats, from Kaiser Wilhelm to Vladimir Putin.
  by Rosa Brooks
  February 20, 2024
  Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on X (Opens in new window)

  The right's never ending swoon for dictators. Here, Charles A. Lindbergh speaks at the America First rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on May 23, 1941. Credit: AP
  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?”

  America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators by Jacob Heilbrunn. February 20, 2024.
  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?