Book Review: 'America First' Again
AMERICA LAST: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators by Jacob Heilbrunn
US conservatives have a history of infatuation with foreign strongmen, dating from the early 1900s and continuing into the second Trump administration. That is the case Jacob Heilbrunn lays out in America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Heilbrunn acknowledges the left’s crush on totalitarians such as Stalin, Mao, and Fidel Castro, but only to say his book is not about that.
America Last works best if the reader does not fixate on the author’s decision not to define right, left, conservative, and liberal. This allows him to paint the right in broad strokes, and as pro-strongman, reactionary, isolationist, and antisemitic. The exasperating flaw of the book is that Heilbrunn supposes it is illiberal to resist illegal immigration, and narrow-minded to oppose trendy relativist values about gender dysphoria. He conflates yesteryear’s antagonism to all immigration with present opposition to open-land borders and illegal immigration.
Regarding democratic values, while he appreciates that America’s “Founding Fathers favored a republican government because of their ‘unease with mass democracy’ ” – i.e. pure, unmitigated majority rule – he criticizes that very unease when it is manifested elsewhere in the political system.
But to the crux of the matter. Heilbrunn’s expository questions are: How, for Trumpian conservatives, did Hungary become an idealized model for a future America? Why is Vladimir Putin so romanticized? What’s with this infatuation with white ethnonationalism (for instance, this week’s over-the-top empathy with Afrikaner South Africans at the White House)?
The apparent issue everyone knows about, but Heilbrunn wants to avoid, is how the media and academia promulgated illiberal woke values that stoked Trumpian reactionary thinking. Heilbrunn sees the Ying but misses the Yang.
With these provisos, I think Heilbrunn does a superb job of sketching America’s intolerant right-wing and showing that it is not much changed.
The right has always liked strong leaders and political orderliness. German Americans (later joined by Irish Catholic grandees like the Kennedys) led the way. “By 1914, one in five Americans were of German origin, and there were over five hundred German-language newspapers,” writes Heilbrunn. I was surprised to learn that H.L. Mencken, the journalist and satirist often quoted for his political wit, was an antisemite and Germanophile who felt a kinship toward the criminal Kaiser Wilhelm II. Mencken even defended the May 7, 1915, sinking of the RMS Lusitania on the grounds that it was, after all, carrying munitions. The 1,193 oblivious civilian passengers who went down with the ship should have known better than to travel on a Cunard liner, he opined.
Against the howls of the conservatives (but not just them), America entered WWI on April 6, 1917, and led the Allies to victory on November 11, 1918. By this time, the Great Influenza pandemic had begun; it would claim 50 million lives. The political systems of America and Europe were stormy. There was disenchantment over the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the Allies’ punishing demands for German war reparations. Next came the stock market crash and the Great Depression in October 1929. The media, in those days heavily conservative, led by William Randolph Hearst, adjusted recent history to make it seem as if Germany was not responsible for WWI. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, Hearst put the “America First” motto on the masthead of his newspapers.
Public opinion during the interbellum was overwhelmingly intolerant and isolationist: the Ku Klux Klan was resuscitated; the US Congress passed a quota on legal immigration. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected to the presidency in 1932, was the right’s nemesis. In shilling for Hitler, conservatives like Henry Ford blamed WWI on the Jews. J.P. Morgan cozied up to Mussolini. After Hitler ignited WWII by invading Poland on September 1, 1939, compelling British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to declare war on Germany, the American right – with Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee in the vanguard – blocked FDR from helping Britain confront the Nazis.
Wealthy influencers like Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father), Christian religious fanatic Elizabeth Dilling, Fred Koch (father of Charles and David), and Charles Walgreen supported Nazi Germany as a bulwark against communism. They, along with Pope Pius XI, also backed General Francisco Franco in Spain on anti-communist grounds.
The rabble-rousing Father Charles Coughlin used his popular national radio program to bully Jews. Mass rallies were held in NYC’s Madison Square Garden in solidarity with Hitler. Yes, Germany surreptitiously employed agents of influence to sway public opinion, and Hearst clandestinely funded isolationist and America First groups – but Americans were overwhelmingly receptive to these messages.
On September 11, 1941, Lindbergh delivered one of his more incendiary speeches, “Who Are the War Agitators?” in Des Moines, naming three “powerful elements” – the British, FDR, and Jews. The fierce momentum with which the right embraced European fascism, and scapegoated “liberals,” communists, and Jews is also well documented elsewhere. Kathryn Olmsted covered some of this same ground in her two laudable books, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler and Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11.
Heilbrunn, however, wants to demonstrate a connection between that old right and today’s Trumpian right.
The stance of fascist and isolationist conservatives was upended on December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. That was followed by Hitler’s declaration of war on the US on December 11.
But don’t imagine conservatives were humbled when WWII ended. Those who had leaned fascist, isolationist, and anti-immigration were now reincarnated as staunch anti-communists at home and abroad, portraying Jews as anti-American and pro-Soviet Reds. The old Germanophiles became backers of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (himself a former isolationist). They saw in the Truman administration’s participation in the United Nations and the Marshall Plan yet another globalist Jewish conspiracy. Even against the backdrop of DP camps filled with Holocaust survivors, conservatives challenged the way Nazi atrocities were portrayed. “Were the German gas chambers really a greater crime against humanity than our attacks on such nonmilitary objectives as Dresden?” asked anti-communist (and later anti-Zionist) author Freda Utley. As she saw it, the Allied Occupation of Germany was too heavy-handed – what America should be doing was forgiving, forgetting, and enlisting Germany in an anti-communist crusade.
In their anti-communist fervor, the right saw Truman and later Dwight Eisenhower as soft on communism. They were not. Nonetheless, in December 1958, Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society to battle plots to impose communism inside the US by what Trumpians today would call the Deep State. The Birchers wanted to promote the isolationist cause and to light a fire under Eisenhower Republicans.
Popular magazines like Time were part of the conservative media’s assault against “going soft” on communism. Time was then owned by Henry Luce, who, after 1948, established its anti-Israel tone. (Following numerous incarnations, the outlet is today owned by Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Benioff.)
Speaking of magazines, conservative National Review founder William F. Buckley (his father was an antisemite and his mother was a Bircher) advocated in his genteel way for dictators from Mexico to Portugal and from the Dominican Republic to Spain, where Franco remained in power until 1975.
I wanted to think that Heilbrunn cast his net too wide by ensnaring Jeane Kirkpatrick in his thesis that rightists were and remain apologists for authoritarian dictators. Jews like me liked Kirkpatrick for standing with Israel as the US ambassador to the UN. She had moved from academia to politics after her November 1979 essay in Commentary “Dictatorships and Double Standards” was brought to Ronald Reagan’s attention, and he appointed her to the UN post. Kirkpatrick argued that there was a distinction between right-wing authoritarian and communist totalitarian regimes. The former could be reformed and maybe evolve into democracies, but totalitarian systems were unchangeable. However, as Heilbrunn documents, this forced her to defend El Salvadoran killing squads and African warlords. I think this was because Kirkpatrick saw Cuba serving as Moscow’s proxy fighting in Africa and Latin America, and believed Havana and Moscow had to be checked at all costs.
Heilbrunn is on safer ground in his takedown of Catholic antisemite Patrick Buchanan, now age 86, an American First champion and isolationist. “What we need is a new nationalism, a new patriotism, a new foreign policy that puts America first, and, not only first, but second and third as well,” he wrote. He co-founded The American Conservative magazine. I think of Tucker Carlson – with his entertaining, folksy, commonsensical-sounding takedown of fulminating opponents – as channeling Buchanan.
Buchanan’s ideas about foreign policy and national interest captured the Trumpian imagination, best manifested in the pronouncements of Vice President JD Vance. Heilbrunn is right that the old right triumphed over neo-conservative Republicans because, during the George W. Bush administration, the latter dissipated America’s treasure, willpower, moral capital, and political credibility on Iraq, the “war on terror,” and Afghanistan – what Trump calls Forever Wars.
So, what Trump did was to cannibalize the long-standing memes of the old right and make them his own. Besides America First and neo-isolationism, Trump has never met an authoritarian he did not have a kind word for, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman.
The trouble is that our choice is not between illiberalism and liberalism but between Trumpian illiberalism and illiberal wokism, which is dangerously utopian, intolerant, and fails the test of common sense. It was hard enough for FDR to overcome the Old Right. The notion that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the “face of the Democratic Party” with a plurality of support in a recent poll, can be an alternative to the Trumpian tsunami is untenable. I know US Jewish liberals think the Democratic Party is not too far gone. Far be it for me to burst their bubble.
The lesson for today is that the hateful conservatives of the past, whom Heilbrunn so well describes, may again be winning America’s hearts and minds because old-school liberals have given up the ghost. Like Heilbrunn, I also see “disquieting similarities between Weimar Germany and America.” So it behooves journalists like Heilbrunn not to repeat the mistakes the forces of tolerance made in an earlier period. Instead, they need to pull together toward the political and moral center to a sensible liberalism that can win Americans over from the demagogues and scammers.