Bøker av Jacob Heilbrunn

Why do Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and much of the far Right so explicitly admire the murderous and incompetent Russian dictator Vladimir Putin? Why is Ron DeSantis drawing from Victor Orbán's illiberal politics for his own policies as governor of Florida-a single American state that has more than twice the population of Orbán's entire nation, Hungary?In America Last, Jacob Heilbrunn, a highly respected observer of the American Right, demonstrates that the infatuation of American conservatives with foreign dictators-though a striking and seemingly inexplicable fact of our current moment-is not a new phenomenon. It dates to the First World War, when some conservatives, enthralled with Kaiser Wilhelm II, openly rooted for him to defeat the forces of democracy. In the 1920s and 1930s, this affinity became even more pronounced as Hitler and Mussolini attracted a variety of American admirers. Throughout the Cold War, the Right evinced a fondness for autocrats such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, while some conservatives wrote apologias for the Third Reich and for apartheid South Africa. The habit of mind is not really about foreign policy, however. As Heilbrunn argues, the Right is drawn to what it perceives as the impressive strength of foreign dictators, precisely because it sees them as models of how to fight against liberalism and progressivism domestically.America Last is a guide for the perplexed, identifying and tracing a persuasion-or what one might call the "illiberal imagination"-that has animated conservative politics for a century now. Since the 1940s, the Right has railed against communist fellow travellers in America. Heilbrunn finally corrects the record, showing that dictator worship is an unignorable tradition within modern American conservatism-and what it means for us today.

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.