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Review of Jacob Heilbrunn’s America Last

October 29, 2024

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America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators
by Jacob Heilbrunn
Liveright
2024

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.

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….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….America Last is simply regurgitating a boilerplate bipartisan consensus usually found in the pages of both publications.

Heilbrunn can be given credit for some intellectual honesty, as his review of America’s right wing extends to some influential figures within the neoconservative tradition. While he assails the sections of the Old Right who saw fascist dictators Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco as bulwarks against the communist hordes and points out that chief paleoconservative Pat Buchanan has been a longtime admirer of Adolf Hitler, he also includes Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a pioneer of neoconservatism, within his criticism. Kirkpatrick wrote the infamous article “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which gave intellectual cover to US support of overseas despots. As President Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Kirkpatrick absolved the junta in El Salvador after their military tortured, raped, and murdered four American nuns. Kirkpatrick claimed “the nuns were not just nuns. They were political activists”—as though political activism was a capital offense!9Raymond Bonner, “The Politician that Wouldn’t Lie,” Politico, April 19, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20201108003521/https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/robert-white-diplomat-el-salvador-117089_Page2.html#.X6c9SuzP32c.

However, one segment of the right largely escapes censure from Heilbrunn: the American libertarian movement. Despite these “radicals for capitalism’s” supposed hostility towards authoritarianism, several of the movement’s leading lights downplayed the crimes of Nazism and embraced Holocaust denial. Libertarian writers James A. Martin, Percy Greaves, and Lew “L.A.” Rollins all ended up at the notorious Holocaust denial outfit, the Institute for Historical Review—a fount of pseudoscholarship designed to exonerate the Nazis. The closest Heilbrunn comes to acknowledging this is by profiling historian Harry Elmer Barnes, whose work appeared in the libertarian journals Rampart and Left and Right. For Heilbrunn, Barnes’s great crime was not to deny the Holocaust but to view World War I as folly.10 If America Last is flawed as history, how does it fare as a reference book? Here there are several defects. For one, there is no index. By way of inadequate substitute, the back cover lists all the appearances of National Review publisher and “crypto Nazi” William F. Buckley. Several of the citations are formatted incorrectly or contain inaccurate information. The book Sabotage!: The Secret War Against America, from 1942, is cited only by the surnames of its authors Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn. It was only because I was familiar with the book that I knew which text Heilbrunn was referring to. All this made flipping through the book to recheck quotes and facts tedious. The lack of attention to sourcing and layouts is part and parcel of Heilbrunn’s lazy acceptance of a bipartisan imperial consensus and mythology.

Another thread Heilbrunn does not follow is the influence of a wing of twentieth century progressivism on American fascists. Two of the men profiled in the book, George Sylvester Vierick and Richard Washburn Child, came out of Roosevelt’s Progressive (Bull Moose) Party. The old Rough Rider’s platform could be read as a precursor to Il Duce’s views. Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism,” attacks on other ethnicities and races (Roosevelt argued there was “no room” in the United States for “hyphenated Americanism”), and desire for overseas empire had a lot in common with Italian fascist doctrine.11Theodore Roosevelt, “Americanism” (address, Knights of Columbus, Carnegie Hall, New York, NY, October 12, 1915), available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68152/68152-h/68152-h.htm.

The truth is that expansionism has been key to the American project since its inception. From the frontier thesis and white man’s burden we were supposedly carrying in Cuba, to our own forever wars, war, domination, and new markets are the order of the day. While the rationales change, as the red hordes of the Cold War no longer serve as useful boogeymen, the policies have not. The military budget climbs ever upward, the overseas bases remain open, and the arms sales to tinpot despots continue.

In his conclusion, Heilbrunn argues that by supporting foreign dictatorships, the American Right puts “the American people, American ideals, and American independence last, not first.” This is not a sin solely committed by the right. Throughout the scope of US history covered by America Last, US presidents from both parties supported overseas dictators. Whether those presidents were conservative Republicans, progressive Democrats, or something in between, they all found reasons to throw professed concerns about democracy and human rights overboard when they got in the way of what they viewed as the national interest.

When Heilbrunn lays out his vision for American foreign policy, it’s not one shared by socialists. President Truman is praised for having “defended Western Europe against Soviet aggression by championing the Marshall Plan and NATO” and “resisted communist aggression against South Korea.” This, along with a massive peacetime military buildup, “established the basis for America’s military victory in the Cold War.” Truman, like segments of the right, was no principled foe of dictatorship: He provided much needed military aid to the Greek royalists (themselves Nazi collaborators) to defeat the Communist partisans and rushed to the aid of a South Korean government led by Syngman Rhee (who massacred thousands of his own people). Truman, like many US presidents, followed the advice of his predecessor Franklin Roosevelt: for those presidents, any son of a bitch can be supported so long as he is “our son of a bitch.”

The supposed antifascist alliance between neoconservatives like Heilbrunn and social democrats like Matthew Sitman has an electoral counterpart in the Kamala Harris campaign’s embrace of Dick and Liz Cheney. At a campaign event in Michigan attended by both Harris and the latter Cheney, the Vice President attacked Trump’s “America first” rhetoric as damaging to American interests. “Isolationism is not insulation,” Harris proclaimed.12Clara Hendrickson, “In event with VP Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney tells Republicans to vote their conscience,” Detroit Free Press, October 21, 2024, https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/21/liz-cheney-helps-kamala-harris-court-michigan-republicans/75779629007/. Contrary to Harris’ assertions, Trump is no isolationist. He is eager to bomb Mexico and regularly rattles his sabers against China.13Zack Beauchamp, “Trump proposed bombing Mexico and it somehow wasn’t a big story,” Vox, July 29, 2024, https://www.vox.com/policy/363146/trump-policy-war-mexico-trade-deportation-border. He’s as much a warmonger as, well, Dick and Liz Cheney. Can the architects of the War on Terror be counted on to defend American democracy? It’s hard to believe that people who acted like such tigers when it came to attacking international law and civil liberties will suddenly change their stripes.

Political movements look overseas for inspiration. Twentieth-century Marxists have looked to the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and elsewhere. Yesterday’s right looked to the German Empire, Francoist Spain, and Mussolini’s Italy. Today, other right-wingers take inspiration from Hungary or want to go “back to the future” to Pinochet’s Chile. Leftists should take them seriously and resist these efforts to fasten down authoritarianism on the American people. But resisting them via strengthening the national security state and thereby the American empire, as Heilbrunn would have us do, would be an incredible mistake. Fascism and the tools of empire are not inseparable. The tools used to perpetuate imperialism can very easily be used to impose fascism. If fascism comes to the United States, it would use the tools of a massive military and intelligence apparatus to crush us like so many bugs. We would all pay the price.

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