Throughout the 20th century to the present, the American right has embraced authoritarian and other anti-democratic values both here and abroad. Domestically, this has taken the form of suppressing the labor movement, the civil rights movement(s), and other attempts to create a real social democracy in the United States. The American right has also long-admired and supported foreign authoritarians and autocrats, including fascists such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
In the Age of Trump, today’s Republican Party and the larger right-wing and “conservative” movement are in thrall to a corrupt ex-president who attempted a coup on Jan. 6, 2021, and is now promising to be a dictator on “day one” if he defeats President Biden and takes over the White House in 2025. Donald Trump is a political entrepreneur and megalomaniac who is responding to his followers’ wants and wishes: Public opinion polls have repeatedly shown that a plurality if not an outright majority of Republicans and Trump MAGA people are hostile to multiracial pluralistic democracy and want a strongman (or outright fascist) leader to ensure and protect White (“Christian”) domination and power over American society.
Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of the National Interest and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is the author of the new book "America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators." His previous books include "They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons."
In this wide-ranging conversation, Heilbrunn reflects on how the mainstream news media is failing to properly explain how the rise of Trumpism and American neofascism is part of a global antidemocracy movement. He also highlights how Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s open admiration of such authoritarians and political thugs as Vladimir Putin is a continuation of much older patterns of behavior by the American right and “conservatives.” Heilbrunn explains how Donald Trump and other Republican leaders are modeling their assault on American democracy from lessons learned abroad. At the end of this conversation, Heilbrunn warns that Vladimir Putin and other enemies of American democracy see Donald Trump and the Republican Party as vessels to undermine the United States.
This is the first of a two-part conversation.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length:
Looking at America today, and the many crises at home and abroad, how are you feeling? How are you navigating and making sense of these years?
I have a fairly phlegmatic temperament, but my Spider-Sense has been tingling ever since Donald Trump declared in December 2015 that he was calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering” America. That declaration signaled to me that he was no ordinary candidate but something out of Philip Roth’s dystopian novel "The Plot Against America." As it turned out, he was plotting against America—with the not-inconsiderable help of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Now it’s déjà vu all over again, as he solicits the return of Paul Manafort to his 2024 campaign.
My unease has been fortified by my family history—my father traveled from Germany via Italy to America in May 1940 as a six-year-old by himself. Restrictive American immigration policies meant that his parents remained trapped behind in the Third Reich. I’ve read up on German history for much of my life as well as spent a good deal of time in the former West and East Germany before reunification took place. The many parallels between the Weimar era and contemporary America—corruption of the judiciary, threats of political violence, glorification of the strongman—are difficult to oversee.
As an expert, what do you “see” in terms of the country and the world, through your critical lenses? How is that helping you to better understand what is happening?
What I see is nothing good.
I don’t think it requires any special expertise to see that American conservatism, if it even deserves that title, has allowed the barrier between the mainstream and the radical right to erode. The American right has embraced its worst, and most durable, traditions: nativism and isolationism.
Most of the commentariat and mainstream media types are generalists with little content expertise or rigorous academic training in the topics and subjects they are opining about. In terms of the global democracy crisis and related problems, can you highlight several examples of the “conventional wisdom” and mainstream narrative that trouble you the most?
The press doesn’t want to state the obvious.
The New York Times recently wrote that Mark Robinson, the GOP candidate for Governor in North Carolina, is “widely seen” as holding anti-Semitic views. Actually, he does. He’s denied the Holocaust. Why can’t the Times say so? Another example: In a piece on Florida judge Aileen Cannon, the Times referred to some of her “strange” decisions without ever mentioning the obvious: She’s deliberately stalling the advent of a trial to protect Trump before the election takes place.
Another fairly obvious problem is the herd mentality of the press. Until President Biden came out firing at the State of the Union, the media largely regurgitated the right-wing line that he was senescent. Yet it was plain as day that Biden has been making the big decisions all along, whether it was pulling out of Afghanistan—against the advice of his foreign policy team—or insisting that America continue to assist Ukraine.
America’s democracy crisis is part of a larger antidemocratic tide around the world. The mainstream news media rarely connects those dots. Trumpism and American neofascism is part of a much larger global movement.
It isn’t just that Trump is part of a larger movement, but that it is actively working to support him. Even as Orbán bellyaches about Washington trying to promote regime change in Budapest, he himself is meddling in American politics, endorsing Trump for a new term and proclaiming that only he can bring peace to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Putin is clearly banking on a Trump victory that would seal his victory over Kyiv and usher in a new world order based on tyranny. To some degree, the media has been cowed by the so-called Russia hoax, which was none at all. The New York Times fell hook, line and sinker for former Attorney General William Barr’s contorted reading of the Mueller Report, which he claimed exonerated Trump. The reverse was the truth.
There is all this shock and amazement from the mainstream news media when Donald Trump and others in the Republican Party praise and fawn over dictators and autocrats, as though it is new. In terms of the American right’s admiration of dictators and other enemies of democracy, how much of this is old? How much is new?
Donald Trump has invented nothing. Instead, this carnival barker has repackaged old hatreds from the past. In 1920 Lothrop Stoddard, a popularizer of eugenics, wrote a best-seller called The Rising Tide of Color, which claimed that the West (Great Britain, Europe and America) had committed a kind of race suicide during World War I. Now a rising tide of color threatened to submerge it. Slot in the Great Replacement and you have a perfect analogue. The 1920s also saw denunciations of Jewish bankers for enmeshing America in World War I and the suppression of schoolbooks that were seen as excessively pro-British.
What of the American Nazi Party and the Bund during World War II? The admiration of Mussolini by the American right?
Mussolini was admired for a variety of reasons, including his emphasis on family values during the 1920s, when American conservatives complained that the roaring ‘20s represented moral decadence and flabbiness. In 1927 Mussolini gave a major speech to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in which he declared that it was high time that the birthrate shoot up and that he was prepared to institute a special tax on bachelors who refused to man up, as it were. President Warren Harding’s former ambassador to Rome, Richard Washburn Child, was elated, penning numerous pieces about the return of moral virtues to Italy in contrast to America.
In America, conservatives such as William Randolph Hearst and George Sylvester Viereck agitated on behalf of Hitler. Nazi Germany was seen as a redoubt of stern masculinity. Charles Lindbergh, who feared a rising tide of color, became the foremost proponent of America First, alleging that Great Britain was doomed to defeat against Nazi Germany. For Lindbergh and others, it was Bolshevism, not Nazism, that constituted the real threat. Even after World War II, leading conservatives continued to maintain that Roosevelt got it wrong: in allying with Winston Churchill, Roosevelt simply allowed Joseph Stalin to conquer Eastern Europe and transform the Soviet Union into an empire.
Where do “mainstream” conservatives such as William F. Buckley and institutions such as The National Review fit into this story?
The extent to which they were mainstream is hotly contested among historians, and with good reason. William F. Buckley, Jr. was a passionate follower of Lindbergh and America First as a lad. The sprawling Buckley clan reviled Roosevelt and opposed entry into World War II. Stalin was the real foe. In the postwar era, Buckley’s self-appointed mission was to sanitize, or at least mainstream, conservatism, one that he more or less succeeded at fulfilling. But there was always a remnant, to use the beloved conservative term, that wanted to cling to older doctrines. Revilo P. Oliver, a virulent anti-Semite who ended up being evicted from the John Birch Society because he went too far even for it; Joseph Sobran, who complained about efforts to “diabolize” Hitler; and Patrick J. Buchanan, who revived the America First credo after the end of the Cold War— were all stalwart contributors to NR, as it was known by its fans.
Then there was the New York businessman Merwin K. Hart, whose career has been extensively chronicled by the historian David Austin Walsh. Hart was a rabid anti-Semite and a champion of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. He saw liberals as an internal, subversive enemy that needed to be stamped out. He and Buckley maintained close ties throughout the 1950s. Their aspiration was to create a conservative counter-establishment that could target the communists and the liberals—who, incidentally, were often seen as one and the same. In their book McCarthy and His Enemies, Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., declared that the great challenge facing the right was “How to get by our disintegrated ruling elite, which had no stomach for battle, and get down to the business of fighting the enemy in our midst.”
To the degree this can be separated or disentangled, how much of the American right’s idolization of political strongmen and other autocrats is “ideological”? How much is a function of the authoritarian personality and the aesthetic and performance of power, where compromise and being progressive and liberal is viewed by many on the right as being inherently “feminine” and “weak” and by comparison the right believes that it is “strong?”
It's the Colonel Blimp phenomenon. One of William F. Buckley, Jr’s favorite words of opprobrium was “etiolated” liberals. His description of General Augusto Pinochet speaks volumes: “His portrait is now seen in every government office: standing erect, big-chested, penetrating eyes, the faintest glimmer of suspicion there…regal, is another way to put it.”
Trump puts it even more baldly. In speaking with Playboy in 1990, he denounced Mikhail Gorbachev for failing to exercise a firm enough hand to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union and praised the Chinese leadership for crushing dissent at Tiananmen Square. As Trump saw it, they knew what they were about—"they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.” There you have it—the doxology that Trump has been preaching decade after decade.
The American right admired (and continues to) Pinochet and other murderous Latin and South American dictators. Authoritarians who disappeared people and murdered “leftists” are praised across the right-wing news propaganda media. Trump and other Republican fascists are publicly and openly threatening murder and violence against their “enemies." Chile and Argentina were also considered models of the “free market” economics and destruction of social democracy that the American right wants to fully impose on this country.
It helps radicalize the already converted who form the shock troops of the Trump brigade. The right perceives itself as the victim of an omnipresent liberal establishment, which is intent on suppressing it. Hence the dramaturgy during Trump’s recent rally in Dayton, Ohio surrounding January 6—Trump’s version of Horst Wessel, the member of the brownshirts who was converted into a martyr by the Nazis after his murder in 1930 by German communists in Berlin. But I can’t help wondering if the mounting radicalism of Trump and his adherents is a sign of weakness rather than strength, at least electorally.
When you saw Donald Trump praising and embracing Hungary’s autocratic leader Viktor Orbán, what does that signal to and portend? What do Orban, Putin and other such malign actors see when they look at Trump and today's Republican Party and "conservative" movement?
They see a political party (and by extension, country) that is ripe for the plucking. Trump cannot be accused of credulity when it comes to Hungary because he has always had a soft spot for dictators. Hungary provides a blueprint for a Trump autocracy—smash the civil service, upend the judiciary, gerrymander elections, award media outlets to your business cronies. This isn’t the outright dictatorship of Putin with people being tossed out of windows but something more insidious. Until recently, I thought what the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon referred to as the “subtle tyrant” would be the model for Trump. But his recent, vitriolic language about “vermin” and a “bloodbath” suggests that he’s veering more toward the Putin model.
