AMERICA LAST

The authoritarian right’s love of dictators is a feature, not a bug—and one with a long history.

Heilbrunn, editor of the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right, examines contemporary groups such as the Heritage Foundation with a gimlet eye, critical of their obeisance to nationalist rulers such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. “How,” he asks, “had a small, landlocked country—with half the population of Florida and dependent on economic subsidies from Brussels—emerged as a model for the proud American Right, those supposed believers in American exceptionalism?” It’s a good question, but also one that could have been raised from the time of the Federalists. The attraction of like to like, of nationalist to nationalist, supremacist to supremacist, is a theme in American history—and, Heilbrunn adds, “a proclivity for authoritarianism is American to its core.” That authoritarianism, as the title bespeaks, holds modern, multicultural, multiethnic America in disdain. It allows a Donald Trump to hope for the country’s economic collapse, and it allows other right-wingers to expound on the idea that the U.S. is a republic and not a democracy. In fact, Heilbrunn argues, the republican features of small-r republican America were put in place to hinder mob rule. Conservative icons such as H.L. Mencken and Henry Regnery are called into question for their support of Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I, and later ideological heirs such as Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlin for their undisguised admiration of the Third Reich. In more recent times, Heilbrunn notes, their nationalism has taken the form of anti-Semitism and, today, pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian posturing—to say nothing of J.D. Vance’s call to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” precisely to emulate “what…Orbán has done.”

A sweeping, well-argued condemnation of the right-wing penchant for totalitarianism.