The Right's Infatuation With Fascist Strongmen Is Nothing New

Jacob Heilbrunn's book excavates the authoritarian intellectual roots of Trump's MAGA movement

Jacob Heilbrunn, author of “America Last” (Liveright, 2024). The UnPopulist illustration.

Book Review

If an award existed for Least Surprising News of the Month, the March prize would go to the revelation that Donald Trump has had kind words for Adolf Hitler. A new book by CNN anchor Jim Sciutto quotes former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly saying that his boss insisted, “Hitler did some good things.” Alarming? Yes. Surprising? Not in the slightest. In 1990, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, told her lawyer that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a bedside cabinet and sometimes read it. The only dubious part of that claim is the idea of Trump reading anything. 

The 45th president is a sharp contrast with Ronald Reagan, whose view of Nazis came through when he spoke at a ceremony at Normandy on the 40th anniversary of the D-Day landing. “For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow,” Reagan declared. He continued:

Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

The Republican Party’s descent from Reagan’s principled and eloquent conservatism to Trump’s toxic narcissism and unabashed yearning for unbridled power is, for many, one of the great mysteries of our time. The party that was once fiercely committed to limited government, individual freedom, and the value of democracy at home and abroad no longer honors those ideals. Today, it has become a haven for Putin apologists, anti-Semites, insurrectionists, white supremacists, conspiracy nuts, and theocrats. Since 2016, the party has been engaged in a ceaseless flirtation with fascism.

Once upon a time, conservatives rightly faulted those on the far left for their infatuation with Communist dictators. Historian Paul Hollander spent much of his distinguished career documenting the eagerness of many notable Americans to ignore the crimes and failures of Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Mao Zedong, among others. Humorist P. J. O’Rourke went on a 1982 cruise on the Volga—a Russian passenger ship—sponsored by The Nation magazine and wrote of his shipmates, “These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.” Yet today it is conservatives who tend to see foreign tyrants through rose-colored lenses.

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To Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, there is no mystery here. In his brisk, concise, and thoroughly documented new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, he argues that the right has always had a fondness for tyrants of a particular sort. He writes:

The longer I’ve listened to conservatives talk about Hungary, Russia, ‘wokeness,’ ‘the deep state,’ abortion, immigration, and media bias, the more I’ve become convinced that many of their arguments are not novel. … If anything, the opposite is true: these arguments represent an act of conservation, preserving in a kind of rhetorical alembic grievances and apprehensions that can be traced all the way back to World War I.

Many of today’s conservatives see Viktor Orbán as an inspiration—just as their ideological forebears composed sonnets for Kaiser Wilhelm, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Augusto Pinochet. By Heilbrunn’s account, “the right’s hostility to democracy is not new. It never went away in the first place.”

A prime example is H. L. Mencken, beloved by liberals as well as conservatives for his incandescent prose, which heaped memorable scorn on such targets as William Jennings Bryan, Warren Harding, and Franklin Roosevelt. But, Heilbrunn points out, Mencken was more indulgent of the Kaiser, under whom “the empire is now governed by its best men.” In 1915, the sage of Baltimore even composed a piece expressing his hope that Germany would conquer the United States—a piece that went unpublished after German submarines sank the Lusitania, a passenger ship, killing the 1,199 people aboard. In 1933, he wrote a strikingly mild review of Mein Kampf, in which he asserted that Hitler’s “anti-Semitism, which has shocked so many Americans, is certainly nothing to marvel over,” before proceeding to rationalize hostility to Jews.

Mencken was only one of the prominent Americans who proved susceptible to Nazism, Heilbrunn maintains. There was also the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who traveled to Germany 1938 to accept a medal from Hermann Göring and to warn of “the infiltration of inferior blood” from Asia (in Reader’s Digest, no less). Lindbergh joined the America First Committee and accused Jews of scheming to embroil the United States in the war in Europe. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who actually paid Hitler and Mussolini for bylined articles, became known as “Hitler’s Man in America.”

Nor were intellectuals immune. Heilbrunn cites several, including Albert Jay Nock, a mentor of William F. Buckley who absolved Germany of World War I blame; Harry Elmer Barnes, who railed against the Treaty of Versailles on his way to becoming a Holocaust denier; Lawrence Dennis, a mixed-race Atlanta native who passed as white and in 1936 published a book called The Coming American Fascism, which he looked forward to; and Lothrop Stoddard, the author of an early version of the Great Replacement Theory. Stoddard argued successfully for immigration controls to block the entry not only of Jews and “the brown and yellow races” but Italians, Greeks, and Slavs, on the grounds that they were innately inferior to people of Nordic ancestry.

Fascism understandably lost much of its allure after World War II, which ended with Hitler swallowing cyanide and Mussolini’s corpse being strung up in Milan’s public square. But its appeal on the right persisted, according to Heilbrunn. William F. Buckley Jr., who sometimes evinced libertarian tendencies, often championed authoritarian figures, from Red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy to Franco to Pinochet, not to mention South Africa’s apartheid rulers. Buckley, however, did strive to purge anti-Semites from the conservative ranks. That effort eventually led to a break with Pat Buchanan—who found virtues in Hitler, blamed Jews for the Iraq War, and denounced efforts to find and deport accused Nazi war criminals. Buchanan lamented the prospect that whites would eventually become a minority in this country and demanded, “Who speaks for the Euro-Americans?” Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, later a fixture on Fox News, wrote in 1992 that the true problem with Buchanan “is not that his instincts are antisemitic but that they are, in various and distinct ways, fascistic.”

None of this kept Buchanan from attracting millions of Republican voters when he ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996—even winning the New Hampshire primary on his second try, Heilbrunn recounts. Where this phenomenon would lead, we now know. When Trump praises Vladimir Putin, depicts undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” and rails against “anti-Christian” policies, he is following a tradition that goes back to Buchanan, Lindbergh, and Mencken. 

Trump has found ample support in the conservative intelligentsia. The Heritage Foundation, “the crown jewel of the conservative movement,” as Heilbrunn notes, has fallen under the spell of Orbán—whom Trump hosted recently at Mar-a-Lago, calling him a “fantastic leader.” Commentators such as Christopher Caldwell, Rod Dreher, and Tucker Carlson are no less enamored of Putin and Orbán than journalist Lincoln Steffens (“I have seen the future, and it works”) was of Stalin.

Heilbrunn finds the sources of this type of thinking in several places. He points out that there is:

a tradition of homegrown authoritarianism in this country. The most obvious expression of that tradition, if one doesn’t count slavery itself, is the Jim Crow South—which helped inspire, as did the dispossession of Native Americans, none other than Hitler himself.

That tradition is bound up with racism and a gnawing fear that whites would lose power to nonwhites, which is today a major driver of Trump’s appeal. It doesn’t take much for a distrust of democracy, which was present even among the Founders, to devolve into a worship of strongman rule. 

A couple of decades ago, the GOP’s future appeared to lie on a different road. Then, the battle of ideas apparently had been won by neoconservatives, who shunned bigotry and nativism and were committed to opposing dictatorial regimes aboard. Founding father Irving Kristol wrote in 1995 that neoconservatism was:

forward-looking, not in any sense dour and reactionary. I once remarked, semi-facetiously, that to be a neoconservative one had to be of a cheerful disposition, no matter how depressing the current outlook. In America all successful politics is the politics of hope, a mood not noticeable in traditional American conservatism.

The label “paleoconservative” adopted by Buchananites connoted a rejection of neoconservatism. 

Just after the invasion of Iraq, Heilbrunn notes, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum did his best to exile the paleos from the GOP. In National Review, he denounced them as:

a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. … They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.

But the invasion and its disastrous consequences did much to shatter the influence of neoconservatives. They were, writes Heilbrunn, “victims of their own success. They got the war they wanted.” Today, neoconservatives like Frum, Bill Kristol, and Peter Wehner, as well as Liz Cheney, are at the forefront of the Never Trump movement, in unapologetic repudiation of their old party.

During the Bush years, however, the neocons had their own unsavory side—rationalizing torture, flouting international law, and favoring aggressive militarism in the name of national security. They and their allies at Fox News made a habit of disparaging the patriotism of anyone who objected to the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. If there is a flaw in this invaluable volume, it’s that Heilbrunn—whose previous book was about the neoconservatives—doesn’t examine the many parallels between the paleos and neos. Among them: a bellicose stance toward Iran; unquestioning support for Israel’s inflexible policy toward Palestinians; and an intemperate zeal and sneering contempt for their adversaries. 

The neocons’ hold on the GOP wasn’t due to their admirable aversion to race-baiting, as it turns out. It was due to their support for a powerful presidency and the use of any means necessary for protecting American interests—attitudes shared by Trump and his followers when it comes to, for example, securing the border. The neoconservative Weekly Standard helped elevate Sarah Palin to the 2008 GOP nomination for vice president, and the resemblance between her and Trump is unmistakable. 

Neoconservatives, including the remnants from The Weekly Standard who eventually comprised the premier Never Trump publication, The Bulwark, deserve credit for recognizing the threat to constitutional democracy posed by Trumpism. Whatever their errors, they never dreamed of subverting our constitutional order to get their way. They favored a strong presidency when it came to national security but they at least tried to make a constitutional case for it, not threaten to replace civil servants with loyalists or weaponize executive agencies to go after those who stood in their way.

Far more than the neoconservatives, the MAGA faction expresses and exploits illiberal impulses that have always been present in the Republican Party. Reading Heilbrunn, the question is not so much how the conservative movement was taken over by the likes of Trump. It’s why it took so long.

© The UnPopulist 2024

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