During his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump pointed to Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as an example of a foreign leader who wanted him to retake the presidency. Referring to the Prime Minister, Trump said, “Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men, they call him a strong man. He’s a tough person. Smart prime minister of Hungary. They said, ‘Why is the whole world blowing up?’ ‘Because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him. China was afraid.’ And I don’t like to use the word afraid, but I’m just quoting him.”1Franco Ordoñez, “Trump points to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as example of his support from foreign leaders,” NPR, September 10, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/09/10/nx-s1-5107967/viktor-orban-hungary-donald-trump-presidential-debate.
Trump’s embrace of the Hungarian autocrat is not a unique quirk. Orbán has been touted by the American Conservative and feted at the Conservative Political Action Conference.2 “When Is a Democracy Not a Democracy?” American Conservative, September 15, 2022, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/when-is-a-democracy-not-a-democracy/; David Folkenflik, “Hungary’s autocratic leader tells U. S. conservatives to join his culture war,” NPR, August 4, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/08/04/1115541985/why-hungarys-authoritative-leader-is-drawing-conservative-crowds-in-the-u-s. A variety of right-wing politicians and intellectuals have pointed to Orbán’s Hungary as the kind of society they want to build in the United States. Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ press secretary suggested that the state’s homophobic “Don’t Say Gay” law was inspired by a similar law passed in Hungary.3Andrew Morantz, “Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future?” New Yorker, June 27, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/does-hungary-offer-a-glimpse-of-our-authoritarian-future. J. D. Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for Vice President, admires Hungary’s efforts to promote “traditional” family values.4 Marin Scotten, “‘Why can’t we do that here?’: JD Vance’s ‘strange’ family politics are a reality in Orban’s Hungary,” Salon, August 14, 2024, https://www.salon.com/2024/08/14/why-cant-we-do-that-here-jd-vances-strange-family-are-a-reality-in-orbans-hungary/. More concerningly than the admiration expressed by the Trumpist movement,, Hungary today is representative of a long-standing trend in US politics, one Trump himself is tapping into but did not create.
Since the emergence of the Trumpist movement, some writers have reexamined the history of the conservative movement, finding early indicators of sympathy for authoritarianism and dictatorship that preceded the forty-fifth president. Last year’s Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow is one example.5Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism (New York: Crown, 2023). The more recent America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators by Jacob Heilbrunn is another.6Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators (New York: Norton, 2024). Although America Last features a blurb from Matthew Sitman, a Dissent contributor and cohost of the podcast Know Your Enemy, Heilbrunn is no socialist. Instead, he is a writer long affiliated with neoconservative Irving Kristol’s National Interest. A blurb on the back cover describes him as a “neocon-trarian.” Neoconservatism colors Heilbrunn’s analysis in revealing ways and makes it difficult to recommend to those not steeped in that political tradition.
America Last begins by detailing sympathy for Kaiser Wilhelm and the German Empire from sections of the American Right. Writers like H.L. Mencken and George Sylvester Vierick admired the order and aristocracy of Germany, as opposed to what they viewed as a chaotic democracy in their home country. Hostility to the Kaiser is not an alien feeling for socialists. In the Canton, Ohio speech that landed him in prison, Eugene Debs praised the “forerunners of the international Socialist movement [who] were fighting the Kaiser and fighting the Junkers of Germany.”7Eugene Debs, “The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech,” Call, 1918, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/canton.htm. Most socialists, however, would not include Wilhelm’s dispatch of “Vladimir Lenin to Russia in a sealed boxcar, thereby abetting” the Russian Revolution as one of Kaiser’s crimes—crimes which include the genocide of the Herero and Nama in what is now Namibia. Heilbrunn does.
Opposition to revolution and hostility towards anti-imperialism are the threads running from neoconservatives like Heilbrunn to the center-left, Cold War-influenced reformists ensconced at Dissent and like-minded publications. There is less daylight between the viewpoints of followers of Irving Howe (late editor of Dissent) and Kristol (late editor of the National Interest) than either would like to admit. Rather than breaking new ideological ground, America Last is simply regurgitating a boilerplate bipartisan consensus usually found in the pages of both publications.
Heilbrunn’s treatment of World War I is indicative of his belief—a bedrock one for neoconservatives and fellow travelers—that the United States should use its military powers to “spread democracy.” He says of those that opposed US involvement in that war (a group that included Debs, anarchist Emma Goldman, and progressive Senators Robert La Follette and George Norris) that they were frightfully naive and “refused to recognize that [the United States’ abstention from the war] would have been tantamount to abandoning Europe to German tyranny.” In Heilbrunn’s telling, the United States going to war was really a form of preventative self-defense, not unlike the rationales given by neoconservatives for President George W. Bush’s war with Iraq. That doesn’t hold water: German tyranny could not advance across the fields of the Marne, much less cross the Atlantic to march down Park Avenue.
For Heilbrunn, the real sin of the American right is a seeming lack of will to commit military forces. Read Heilbrunn’s description of the 1920s, when Democratic President Wilson was replaced by Republicans Harding and Coolidge: “Wilsonian internationalism was out. Isolationism was in.” This is simply public school mythology. The 1920s saw the continuation of American military occupations of Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras. Doubtlessly, the residents of those nations saw little difference between internationalism and isolationism. This was, after all, the period when Major General Smedley Butler described his service in the Marine Corps as acting as a “gangster for capitalism.” It’s more accurate to say that the 1920s represented a retreat from the concerns of Europe, not a general retreat from US military and economic involvement overseas. That has been a bipartisan concern that persists no matter which party occupies the White House. The positive reception given to America First by left-leaning reviewers who should know that Heilbrunn is playing fast and loose with history indicates that, for them, opposition to American empire is not a primary concern.
Heilbrunn viewed the US right’s predilection for the work of revisionist historians who believed “Wall Street was in cahoots with munitions manufacturers; elites were spreading fake news; East Coast bankers and diplomats were scheming to enmesh America needlessly in foreign wars” to be a sign of their sympathy for Germany in the 1920s. Didn’t a great many Americans, socialists and otherwise, believe the same thing? Wilson himself said of World War I: “This war, in its inception was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.”8Woodrow Wilson, “Address at the Coliseum in St. Louis Missouri,” American Presidency Project, accessed October 26, 2024, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-coliseum-st-louis-missouri. Heilbrunn’s description of the 1920s evinces his belief in the inherent goodness of American government and society—an ongoing theme of the work. The writer describes the 1920s as a time when “America’s formerly self-confident claim to stand for democratic values was further sabotaged by a new sympathy for eugenics.” It’s precisely because of Heilbrunn’s belief in American exceptionalism that he never gets around to asking why that claim for democratic values was not already sabotaged by the distinct lack of democracy south of the Mason-Dixon both pre- and post-Reconstruction.