So far, most attempts to create a genealogy for today’s right have focused on domestic politics. As a result, they have neglected one of the most notable and troubling aspects of the Trump political brand: his embrace of foreign authoritarian leaders not merely as geopolitical allies but also as models for how to live the good life. Inside the Beltway, foreign policy experts have sounded the alarm about Trump’s chest-thumping, dictator-loving style as an assault on democratic norms, out of step with American tradition and reason and the ways things are done. But as the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn points out in his punchy and engaging new book, America Last, Trump’s America-first proclivities—including his admiration for foreign strongmen—have their own history. Once upon a time, those ideas occupied the fringes, alarming for their content but not necessarily for their influence. Today, they are going mainstream.
DEVOTED TO DICTATORSHIP
Heilbrunn came of age with the post–Cold War establishment. He began his career in 1989 at The National Interest, the house organ of the then flourishing neoconservative movement. During the Clinton administration, he became a staffer at The New Republic (arguably more neoliberal than neoconservative at the time), before returning to The National Interest in 2008 and eventually becoming its editor. From that vantage point, Heilbrunn has been both witness to and critic of an emerging far-right subculture organized around the veneration of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian President Viktor Orban. At The New Republic, Heilbrunn coined the term “theocon” to describe the hierarchical, isolationist, overtly Christian orientation that seemed to be catching on with a new generation of Republican leaders. Even so, like many Washington insiders, he did not quite see Trump coming.
Once Trump arrived, however, Heilbrunn recognized the type. “The longer I’ve listened to conservatives today 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,” he writes. “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.” America Last is Heilbrunn’s effort to describe how the United States got from there to here, thanks to a wild array of far-right intellectuals, politicians, and would-be tyrants.