American history is full of deep, dark pockets; D.J. Trump’s attraction to dictators is nothing new.
'The Real Reason Trump Loves Putin' (Atlantic Magazine, excerpts)
'A new book explores the American right’s tendency to admire and want to emulate foreign dictators.'
By Franklin Foer
MARCH 1, 2024, 8:17 AM ET
‘FOR NEARLY THE ENTIRETY of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief. Adoration of the Russian leader, who murders his domestic opponents, kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children, and interferes in American presidential elections, is so hard to comprehend that it seems only plausibly explained by venal motives—thus the search to find the supposed kompromat the Kremlin lords over Trump or compromising business deals that Trump has pursued in Moscow.’
‘But there’s a deeper, more nefarious truth about people on the right’s baffling unwillingness to criticize the Kremlin: They actually share its worldview. Putin worship isn’t even an aberration in the history of conservatism, merely the latest instance of a long tradition of admiring foreign dictators. Over the past century, without ever really blushing, the American right has similarly celebrated the likes of Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and just about every Latin American military junta that called itself anti-communist.’
‘The right hails these dictators as ideological comrades in the war to preserve traditional society, the values of order and patriarchy, against the assault of the decadent left. Unlike conservative politicians in the United States, these foreign leaders don’t even need to bother with mouthing encomiums to concepts like tolerance, freedom, and democracy. They can deliver reactionary politics in the unvarnished form that some hard-liners on the American right have always hoped would take root in their own country. As the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn argues in America Last, his history of conservatives’ romance with dictators, “Conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model at home.”
‘Heilbrunn makes the interesting decision to begin his history on the eve of World War I. A primary villain in these chapters is the newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken, perhaps the most celebrated curmudgeon in the history of American letters. Walter Lippmann called him “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people.” A conservative movement as such did not exist in the earliest decades of the 20th century, just a constellation of reactionary intellectuals and their wealthy patrons who nodded in agreement, nostalgic for the antebellum South and a world before mass suffrage. Mencken, the most eloquent of the reactionaries, put their cantankerous thoughts into ornate, often quite funny prose.’
‘Mencken believed fervently in the superiority of German civilization—and in the leadership of its racist, war-mongering monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. This reverence stemmed from ancestral pride; Mencken’s paternal grandfather came from Saxony. But his affection for Germany also grew from his disdain of American democracy, which he believed ceded control of society to mediocre politicians. By contrast, he liked that Germany was “governed by an oligarchy of its best men.” Just before America officially entered World War I, he submitted an article to The Atlantic in which he imagined that Germany might one day conquer the United States and create a new utopia on its shores. Ellery Sedgwick, then the editor of this magazine, had the good sense to reject it. “I have no desire to foment treason,” Sedgwick wrote him.’
‘Looking back on World War I, there were compelling conservative reasons for considering intervention a catastrophe. Financing the war required the imposition of a federal income tax, which never went away in peacetime. And no matter one’s political stripe, the war’s staggering body count was hard to justify. But what emerged on the right in the aftermath of the fighting wasn’t a form of pacifism—rather, it was a set of conspiratorial arguments that became a dishonorable tradition of isolationism. This pattern would repeat itself at the onset of every war: The isolationists would point an accusatory finger at bankers, whom they accused of being eager to profit off bloodshed. They would describe the authoritarian enemies of the United States as helpless victims, peaceful governments minding their own business. In the course of casting the dictators as the injured party, conservatives airbrushed their records of militarism and racism. Minimizing these sins wasn’t just a matter of rhetorical convenience; it was an act of sympathy. In the case of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, a significant segment of the intellectual American right shared their racialist views about the superiority of Nordic peoples.’
‘HEILBRUNN ISN’T THE FIRST to tell the story of the right’s barely submerged affinity for Hitler. Philip Roth’s great counterfactual novel, The Plot Against America, takes this affinity as its premise—and as does Rachel Maddow’s recently published history, Prequel. But it’s always bracing to be reminded of how former President Herbert Hoover made excuses for Hitler before the war and how the press baron William Randolph Hearst commissioned stories by him.’
‘The biggest fans of fascist autocracy weren’t yokels shaking their pitchforks, but cultivated patricians from the oldest New England families. Benito Mussolini’s American fan section consisted of the eminent literary critic Irving Babbitt, a legendary Harvard professor, and the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Not just Hearst but also Henry Ford and others among the nation’s richest men were some of the chief apologists for Nazi Germany. Their attraction—sometimes subconscious, but quite often stated flatly—was born of fear that America was slipping away from them, as immigrants poured into the country and mass democracy took hold. Fascism represented a hopeful example of a revanchist elite reversing the tide.’
‘Hitler’s defeat, and the full knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust, did little to spur the right to rethink its admiration of authoritarianism. In fact, the historian Fred Siegel once described the late 1940s and early ’50s as the moment when the isolationists attempted to exact revenge. Senator Joe McCarthy and his allies tried to tear down the reputations of the internationalist proponents of the New Deal who most fervently advocated for the war, by smearing them as Communists. But McCarthy was also waging a retrospective argument about World War II: that the Americans had no claim to superiority over the Germans. When he burst onto the scene, in 1949, McCarthy held hearings into what he described as the mistreatment of a Nazi Panzer division, on trial for murdering dozens of American prisoners of war. McCarthy speciously argued that the Germans were being tried on trumped-up evidence. Such accusations about America’s supposed abusive treatment of Nazis became a right-wing trope. Henry Regnery’s publishing house provided an outlet for criticism of the Nuremberg trials, before it went on to print books by William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and Whitaker Chambers that launched the modern conservative movement. '(Atlantic Magazine, By Franklin Foer) The gifted link below will only be available for the next 13 days)
I want to read Jacob Heilbrunn’s book. It seems to me that the Americans who share these world views are supporting mediocre or corrupt politicians who want to maintain their power at any cost, including the destruction of our polity. We definitely do not need dictatorship, and we need to educate our children and adults about how government is structured, and that self-government is not a spectator sport. The people who think having Trump as dictator for life is a great idea will find out the hard way it will hurt all of us.
American history is full of deep, dark pockets; D.J. Trump’s attraction to dictators is nothing new.
'The Real Reason Trump Loves Putin' (Atlantic Magazine, excerpts)
'A new book explores the American right’s tendency to admire and want to emulate foreign dictators.'
By Franklin Foer
MARCH 1, 2024, 8:17 AM ET
‘FOR NEARLY THE ENTIRETY of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief. Adoration of the Russian leader, who murders his domestic opponents, kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children, and interferes in American presidential elections, is so hard to comprehend that it seems only plausibly explained by venal motives—thus the search to find the supposed kompromat the Kremlin lords over Trump or compromising business deals that Trump has pursued in Moscow.’
‘But there’s a deeper, more nefarious truth about people on the right’s baffling unwillingness to criticize the Kremlin: They actually share its worldview. Putin worship isn’t even an aberration in the history of conservatism, merely the latest instance of a long tradition of admiring foreign dictators. Over the past century, without ever really blushing, the American right has similarly celebrated the likes of Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and just about every Latin American military junta that called itself anti-communist.’
‘The right hails these dictators as ideological comrades in the war to preserve traditional society, the values of order and patriarchy, against the assault of the decadent left. Unlike conservative politicians in the United States, these foreign leaders don’t even need to bother with mouthing encomiums to concepts like tolerance, freedom, and democracy. They can deliver reactionary politics in the unvarnished form that some hard-liners on the American right have always hoped would take root in their own country. As the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn argues in America Last, his history of conservatives’ romance with dictators, “Conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model at home.”
‘Heilbrunn makes the interesting decision to begin his history on the eve of World War I. A primary villain in these chapters is the newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken, perhaps the most celebrated curmudgeon in the history of American letters. Walter Lippmann called him “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people.” A conservative movement as such did not exist in the earliest decades of the 20th century, just a constellation of reactionary intellectuals and their wealthy patrons who nodded in agreement, nostalgic for the antebellum South and a world before mass suffrage. Mencken, the most eloquent of the reactionaries, put their cantankerous thoughts into ornate, often quite funny prose.’
‘Mencken believed fervently in the superiority of German civilization—and in the leadership of its racist, war-mongering monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. This reverence stemmed from ancestral pride; Mencken’s paternal grandfather came from Saxony. But his affection for Germany also grew from his disdain of American democracy, which he believed ceded control of society to mediocre politicians. By contrast, he liked that Germany was “governed by an oligarchy of its best men.” Just before America officially entered World War I, he submitted an article to The Atlantic in which he imagined that Germany might one day conquer the United States and create a new utopia on its shores. Ellery Sedgwick, then the editor of this magazine, had the good sense to reject it. “I have no desire to foment treason,” Sedgwick wrote him.’
‘Looking back on World War I, there were compelling conservative reasons for considering intervention a catastrophe. Financing the war required the imposition of a federal income tax, which never went away in peacetime. And no matter one’s political stripe, the war’s staggering body count was hard to justify. But what emerged on the right in the aftermath of the fighting wasn’t a form of pacifism—rather, it was a set of conspiratorial arguments that became a dishonorable tradition of isolationism. This pattern would repeat itself at the onset of every war: The isolationists would point an accusatory finger at bankers, whom they accused of being eager to profit off bloodshed. They would describe the authoritarian enemies of the United States as helpless victims, peaceful governments minding their own business. In the course of casting the dictators as the injured party, conservatives airbrushed their records of militarism and racism. Minimizing these sins wasn’t just a matter of rhetorical convenience; it was an act of sympathy. In the case of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, a significant segment of the intellectual American right shared their racialist views about the superiority of Nordic peoples.’
‘HEILBRUNN ISN’T THE FIRST to tell the story of the right’s barely submerged affinity for Hitler. Philip Roth’s great counterfactual novel, The Plot Against America, takes this affinity as its premise—and as does Rachel Maddow’s recently published history, Prequel. But it’s always bracing to be reminded of how former President Herbert Hoover made excuses for Hitler before the war and how the press baron William Randolph Hearst commissioned stories by him.’
‘The biggest fans of fascist autocracy weren’t yokels shaking their pitchforks, but cultivated patricians from the oldest New England families. Benito Mussolini’s American fan section consisted of the eminent literary critic Irving Babbitt, a legendary Harvard professor, and the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Not just Hearst but also Henry Ford and others among the nation’s richest men were some of the chief apologists for Nazi Germany. Their attraction—sometimes subconscious, but quite often stated flatly—was born of fear that America was slipping away from them, as immigrants poured into the country and mass democracy took hold. Fascism represented a hopeful example of a revanchist elite reversing the tide.’
‘Hitler’s defeat, and the full knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust, did little to spur the right to rethink its admiration of authoritarianism. In fact, the historian Fred Siegel once described the late 1940s and early ’50s as the moment when the isolationists attempted to exact revenge. Senator Joe McCarthy and his allies tried to tear down the reputations of the internationalist proponents of the New Deal who most fervently advocated for the war, by smearing them as Communists. But McCarthy was also waging a retrospective argument about World War II: that the Americans had no claim to superiority over the Germans. When he burst onto the scene, in 1949, McCarthy held hearings into what he described as the mistreatment of a Nazi Panzer division, on trial for murdering dozens of American prisoners of war. McCarthy speciously argued that the Germans were being tried on trumped-up evidence. Such accusations about America’s supposed abusive treatment of Nazis became a right-wing trope. Henry Regnery’s publishing house provided an outlet for criticism of the Nuremberg trials, before it went on to print books by William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and Whitaker Chambers that launched the modern conservative movement. '(Atlantic Magazine, By Franklin Foer) The gifted link below will only be available for the next 13 days)
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/jacob-heilbrunn-america-last-trump-putin/677609/?gift=HXqjFN-j-dud0TbzU8NbDkj0-2fc_M2m6rfCLbYS-eo&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
I want to read Jacob Heilbrunn’s book. It seems to me that the Americans who share these world views are supporting mediocre or corrupt politicians who want to maintain their power at any cost, including the destruction of our polity. We definitely do not need dictatorship, and we need to educate our children and adults about how government is structured, and that self-government is not a spectator sport. The people who think having Trump as dictator for life is a great idea will find out the hard way it will hurt all of us.
Thank you Fern.
Hi Mark, good to 'see' you. Thanks for reading. It is worthwhile to know the threads
sewn through the US. Salud!
I appreciate your many additions to Heather’s Substack.
Me, too!!!
Thank you, pal.
It was CONservative that you find in Prequel (Rachel Maddow) supporting Hitler and Mussolini.