Looking for their strong man

There has always been a cohort of highbrow Americans who were certain they are too smart, too important, too well educated to have to accommodate themselves to a messy, noisy, sometimes smelly democratic and popular system of government. Jacob Heilbrunn offers a survey of the type in America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Yes, Donald Trump's admiring Putin apologists and intellectual sycophants are nothing new.

In fact, autocrats and fascists have long been attractive to some Americans. As we lurched toward engaging in the Great War (World War I, 1917-18) on the side of the Brits and French, plenty of intellectuals thought we'd do better siding with the German Kaiser.

... intellectuals on the Right displayed an unease with mass democracy that manifested itself in a hankering for authoritarian leaders abroad. In the 1920s and 1930s, this set of beliefs or habit of mind, became even more pronounced as Hitler and Mussolini attracted a variety of American devotees, including the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and the aviator Charles Lindbergh ... Throughout the Cold War, the Right evinced a fondness for autocrats such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet ... Today, a Hungarian strongman who is peddling volkisch ethnonational thought as a replacement pan-European ideology ... is the latest object of the Right's dictator worship ...

... they denounce "cancel culture," but are busily canceling anything that nettles them, from books to beer. They define freedom as the ability to suppress the views and beliefs, ranging from transgender rights to an independent media, that they revile. At bottom, they are advocating ethno-nationalism in the guise of a set of principles.

As Heilbronn points out, it has usually been the Left which has been charged in this country with admiring foreign authoritarian autocracies -- and sometimes we have. But we did so in the belief and hope that a different, anti-capitalist, organization of society would more completely promote the general welfare, in the words of the preamble to our country's Constitution. Sometimes we've been quite wrong in the foreign movements in which we located hope. But unlike these sad and despicable Right figures that Heilbrunn chronicles, we mostly didn't err out of snobbery, bigotry, racism, and injured self-importance. We wanted the greatest good for the greatest number. The Right wingers seem to me to have just wanted more goods and unearned respect for themselves.

America Last is not a book for everyone, but it sure captures a slice of our intellectual and political history that a lot of conservatives would prefer to see swept under a rug. This is one bit of a necessary history of the U.S. in the twentieth century.