It has long been a truism in modern America that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Of course, like most truisms and folk wisdom, that is not entirely true in practice. During the Cold War (and in earlier eras as well), there have been serious and deep divides and fissures between the right and the left about how the country should approach power, politics, and influence abroad. In one of the most notable examples, there were partisan divides about the Vietnam War. Democrats and Republicans often disagreed about how to approach foreign policy in Latin and South America. The Iran-Contra scandal and support for the Nicaraguan anti-Communist guerrillas are infamous examples.
Politics most certainly did not stop at the oceans, when in the context of the Cold War, the America right targeted Americans in the Red Scare, Lavender Scare, and through the Cointel Program. Deemed to be “the enemy” because they were supposedly “Communists” or agents of the Soviet Union, in reality, most of the Americans targeted in these right-wing wing witch hunts were only “guilty” of exercising their fundamental Constitutional rights and/or being members of marginalized groups or otherwise disagreeing with mainstream American politics and the elite consensus.
These policy disagreements are colored by how the America right and “conservatives” have long admired authoritarians, autocrats, tyrants, and despots abroad. In the Age of Trump and ascendant American fascism this admiration is gross, obvious, and unrepentant. Trump, a man who has promised to be a dictator on “day one” of his presidency, publicly fawns over and admires the likes of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán. Today’s Republican Party has basically allied itself with the global anti-democracy movement.
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 offers some historical context for how the Republican Party and the conservative movement in the Age of Trump decided to get in bed with Vladimir Putin and the global antidemocracy movement. Heilbrunn explains how Trump and the Republican Party’s support of Putin in his war of aggression against Ukraine reflects broader trends in how the American right has long-supported authoritarians and other enemies of democracy. In total, the Age of Trump is the culmination of deep antidemocratic fervor that has long animated the American right.
This is the second part of a two-part conversation, edited for length and clarity. Read the first section here.
How did we arrive at a place where a former and perhaps future president and one of the country’s two main institutional political parties openly praises and admires autocrats and authoritarians, basically political thugs, like Vladimir Putin?
The groundwork was set over the past several decades by Patrick J. Buchanan, who started calling for a return to America First in 1990 after the end of the Cold War. He struck a responsive chord but didn’t have the political chops to translate his fervor into a mass movement. Buchanan denounced the Clinton administration for halting Serbia’s genocidal war against Bosnia in 1995 and deemed Bosnia a “fictitious country.” He also denounced NATO expansion. Buchanan went on to hail Putin as a Russian paleoconservative and argued that the West had encircled Russia. Others agreed. In 2017, Christopher Caldwell declared in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis magazine that Putin was “the preeminent statesman of our time.” Trump, who breathes contempt for American democracy, has schooled the GOP itself to view Putin as a decisive leader worthy of respect and admiration. He might well invite Putin to the White House for a state dinner in a second term.
The issue is not confined to Trump. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis actually met with top Hungarian officials, including former president Katalin Novak, to suss out ways to transport Hungary’s model to Florida. Exhibit A is his assault on the New College of Florida. Orbán drove out the Central European University from Budapest. DeSantis simply eviscerated New College, including terminating its gender studies program. For its part, the Heritage Foundation is working hand-in-glove with the Hungarian government. It even met with Hungarian officials to help stymie any congressional aid to Ukraine.
The Republican Party and American right present itself as the real defenders of freedom at home and abroad. The facts and reality are of course much different.
A second Trump presidency would probably see Richard Grenell as Secretary of State. My guess is that he would openly and actively support the Freedom Party in Austria and the Alternative for Germany in the Federal Republic. Trump’s aim would be to create an illiberal international. In a sense, the democracies of Western Europe would become sitting ducks. Trump would invert our longstanding support for democracy and ally himself with Orbán and Putin against our old allies. It would be the beginning, not the end, of American carnage. Trashing the international order would gut the dollar as a reserve currency, rattle the stock market and return us to the instability of the 1930s.
We need to talk about institutions and networks of power and resources. In terms of the American right’s relationship historically and in the present to authoritarians and other anti-democratic actors abroad, what are some examples?
Spain became a beehive of activity for American conservatives who founded an organization called the American Union for Nationalist Spain that raised funds for Franco and promoted propaganda in America. The Nazi propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, who agitated on behalf of Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I, had a publishing house called Flanders Hall that disseminated numerous isolationist works. He also set up a front organization called the Islands for War Debts Committee that distributed Nazi propaganda to hundreds of thousands of Americans by relying on the congressional franking system. Today, the Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Partnership Institute are promoting the Hungarian rhapsody, as it were. A new generation of Trump loyalists is supposed to be incubated. The Trump movement is being institutionalized in Washington with the rise of other organizations like the American First Policy Institute or America First Legal.
What do we know about the Danube Institute in Hungary? What are its connections to today’s American “conservative” movement, and “thought leaders” and others who are committed to undermining pluralistic democracy, both here in the United States and globally?
The Danube Institute is the epicenter of conservative efforts to reach out to influential journalists, think tank fellows and politicians in America and Great Britain. It’s headed by John O’Sullivan, who was a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher and editor of the National Review. It offers a reminder that the barriers to entry for foreign governments intent on maximizing their influence are low in America. Balazs Orban, a political director for Viktor Orbán (no relation), heavily promotes the Danube Institute and frequently travels to America to meet with various conservative organizations in New York and Washington. Rod Dreher, a visiting fellow, has become the institute’s golden boy, writing regularly for the Hungarian Conservative magazine. Recently, he wrote a piece for the American Conservative sardonically titled “An American’s Letter from the Hungarian Gulag.” Another American who has risen high in the Hungarian firmament is Gladden Pappin, president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. It all sounds like something out of an Evelyn Waugh novel—unless they actually can exercise real power and influence during a second Trump presidency.
During the 1980s and 1990s, my mentors and others who I respected were heavily involved in the anti-Apartheid movement. How can we trace support by Reagan and the Republicans for that white supremacist regime to the continuing admiration of such “ethnonationalism” if not outright racist and white supremacist policies that are being advanced by Putin, Orbán, and others?
I trace it all the way back to Lothrop Stoddard and the 1920s. How conscious they are of this intellectual thread is an open question. But the latest generation has definitely glommed onto and revived some of the most deplorable, if I may use that word, beliefs from the past. They were confined to the margins in Europe after World War II. But nolens volens they have reemerged as the right depicts itself as the one movement ready and prepared to defend the ethnic composition of the nation-state, whether in Russia or America. It is shocking that the Volkish thinking that historians such as George Mosse or Fritz Stern described and analyzed has been creeping back into respectability. The politics of cultural despair that Stern described has proved hardier than most historians would have expected. But once again, it offers a reminder that Trump is simply packaging old wine in new bottles.
I am a child of the 1980s and the end of the Cold War. Growing up in the era and then with Clinton and Bush and the “end of history” and America hegemony and the fantasy of a unipolar world, the common sense conventional wisdom was that politics stopped at the ocean. The Republicans and Democrats may disagree domestically, and also on the details and specifics of foreign policy, but there was a larger overlap of interests and consensus about American power, alliances, and who our friends and enemies were. Looking back, how true or not was that narrative?
The notion that politics stops at the water’s edge is wholly exaggerated. A few examples: Nixon connived to ensure that the Vietnam War did not come to an end before he was elected in 1968. The disputes over Central America in the 1980s were so virulent that the Reagan administration concocted a secret foreign policy in the form of Iran-Contra to perform an end-run around Congress. The dispute over aid to Ukraine is in some ways reminiscent of the spats over Central America, though the Biden administration appears to have refrained from the impulse, as far as we know, to embark upon a clandestine effort to aid Ukraine. A consensus over foreign policy probably came closest to existing in the 1950s until the disputes over the Vietnam War. But even then, the right claimed that New Deal liberal traitors were subverting the fight against communism and that Dwight D. Eisenhower was too timorous to embark upon a real rollback strategy against communism.
In another time, not too long, ago the American response to Russia’s war against Ukraine would be relatively simple. How did we arrive at a state where the Republicans and the larger right are de facto siding with Putin against Ukraine?
To some extent, the two sides have flipped. As I mentioned, the Democrats became gun-shy about intervention after Vietnam during the 1970s and 1980s. The Republicans bashed them for being weak on national security. Now the reverse is occurring. The GOP is moving full tilt toward isolationism, coupled with the veneration for foreign dictators (which adds an element that didn’t really exist for the Democrats). It does raise a question: To what extent was Republican opposition to communism simply a matter of political opportunism as opposed to genuine ideological fervor?
How did the end of the Cold War create a larger space for the American right-wing to now publicly embrace dictators and other authoritarians? Moreover, to take them as role models and guides for how America should be governed and organized?
It didn’t happen overnight, but freedom from the anti-communist liturgy, coupled with the disastrous second Iraq War, meant that conservatives went back to the future. They jettisoned the neocon credo in exchange for older doctrines. All along Patrick J. Buchanan and others had argued that the neocons were usurpers who did not represent the true Republican faith. Now the (largely Jewish) neocons have been expelled and the GOP is embracing doctrines that the former viewed as heretical—high tariffs and isolationism. How long the GOP will continue to support Israel is also an open question.
You have been sounding the alarm about Trump and his authoritarian – dictator threats and promises. What has the reaction to your truth-telling been like from “conservatives”?
So far, apart from the Never Trumpers, the reaction has been quiescence. Make of that what you will!
What will American leadership look like in a world where Trumpism or some other variant of authoritarian populism and neofascism has taken control of the Republican Party and “conservative movement”? In the worst-case scenario, what about American leadership look like under Dictator Trump and his successors?
American leadership would head directly in the opposite direction from the past decades. Trump would seek to shutter organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy. He would sever aid to Ukraine. He would announce that he regards NATO’s article V as null and void rather than seeking to withdraw formally from the organization.
On the home front, Stephen Miller is already broadcasting plans to establish what would appear to be concentration camps on the southern border to house migrants. My advice: go read Philip Roth’s "The Plot Against America" to see what the atmosphere would resemble under a Trump autocracy. Like Kim Jong Eun, he wants people to sit up straight when he speaks. It can happen here.
What gives you the most fear in this moment and looking forward? What if anything gives you hope?
The most disturbing thing remains Trump’s enablers—the incense-burners, the bootlickers, the pursuivants who can ensure that his tyrannical ambitions are realized. That Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell truckled to Trump by endorsing him is further testament to the hollow men that are leading the GOP. At the same time, I remain convinced that Trump’s megalomania — his growing radicalism, his frequent threats, his general odiousness — represents a path to electoral calamity in 2024 for the GOP.
