America Last: Right-wing admiration for foreign autocracies, with Jacob Heilbrunn

The Vital Center

When the Soviet Union came into being in 1917, some American left-wing intellectuals hailed the establishment of the new “workers’ paradise” as the model for the United States (and indeed the rest of the world) to follow. Some even traveled to Russia to pay homage to the communist dictatorship – as for example journalist Lincoln Steffens, who upon returning from Moscow and Petrograd infamously declared: “I have seen the future, and it works.” In later years, some American leftists saw similar visions on their visits to left-wing authoritarian regimes such as Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba.

But this fascination with foreign autocrats also had its counterpart on the conservative side, as veteran journalist Jacob Heilbrunn explains in his fascinating new book America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Other commentators have noticed the contemporary American right’s embrace of figures such as Hungary’s Victor Orbán — the Conservative Political Action Conference held its third annual gathering in Budapest in May 2024 — and Vladimir Putin, whose “genius” and “savvy” Donald Trump praised after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But Heilbrunn writes that such attitudes are merely the latest manifestation of a conservative tradition that traces back to the First World War, “when intellectuals on the Right displayed an unease with mass democracy that manifested itself in a hankering for authoritarian leaders abroad.” This tradition continued with right-wing praise for Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy during the interwar years, and for Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile during the Cold War.

In this podcast interview, Heilbrunn discusses the ways in which the Old Right’s preoccupations have returned to the modern American conservative movement as well as the ways in which the New Right’s founder, William F. Buckley Jr., used the hatreds unleashed by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade as a political weapon. He explains why paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchanan liked the neoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s distinction between right-wing authoritarians and totalitarians, and also why Buchanan is not so much an isolationist as an advocate for a kind of internationalism rooted in conservative values, whiteness, and cultural pessimism about liberal democracy.