America Last

A leading observer of the right explains the long, disturbing history behind Donald Trump’s admiration for Vladimir Putin and Ron DeSantis’s veneration of Victor Orban

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Why is today’s Republican Party, which claims to be the defender of American values, so drawn to the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and the brazenly illiberal Victor Orban, who has crushed an independent judiciary and political dissent in Hungary? As Jacob Heilbrunn shows, the obvious affection conservatives display for foreign autocrats, though a striking and seemingly inexplicable fact of our current moment, dates to the First World War. Since that time, leading intellectuals, journalists and politicians on the right have always been drawn to what they perceive as the impressive strength of authoritarians abroad—including Kaiser Wilhelm, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler and Augusto Pinochet—who offered models of how to fight back against liberalism and progressivism domestically. For decades, conservatives railed against communist fellow travellers in America, but have their own delusional history of apologetics. In this fast-paced, often-droll account, Heilbrunn argues that dictator worship is a longstanding romantic impulse that fits firmly within the modern American political tradition—and shows what it means for us today.