Why the Right Loves Foreign Dictators (w/ Jacob Heilbrunn)
Added 2024-03-11 18:23:26 +0000 UTCThe right's romance with odious foreign dictators didn't start with Putin or Viktor Orbán, and their profound contempt for democracy long predates January 6. In his new book, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, Jacob Heilbrunn traces this tradition on the right—in many ways their most deeply rooted and enduring tradition in foreign affairs—back over a century to the embrace of Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I and envy of Mussolini to the present. In this discussion, Matt and Sam ask Heilbrunn about the connection between race science and fear of democracy in the early 20th century, what the right saw in Italian fascism, the machinations of the right's pivot from Nazi revisionism to the onset of the Cold War, Jeane Kirkpatrick and the supposed distinction between authoritarianism and "totalitarianism," the profound consequences of the failure of neoconservatism, the coming disaster of a second Trump term, and more.
Sources:
Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators (2024)
The Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (2008)
RJB Bosworth, Mussolini (2010)
J. Valerio Borghese, Sea Devils: Suicide Squad (Regnery, 1954)
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, "Dictatorships & Double Standards," Commentary, Nov 1979.
Listen:
Know Your Enemy, "The American Right’s Hungary Hearts, (w/ Lauren Stokes and John Ganz)"
Comments
Only just now realized that Mencken’s American Mercury is the same American Mercury of Neo-Nazi fame. It happened long after he exited, but feels fitting…
Blackford Oakes
2024-04-25 21:56:18 +0000 UTCFunny, I actually thought of him as well ! KYE and Radio War Nerd may or may not be a hazardous collab, I wonder what Sam and Matt think of it. In any case I agree he also should have some good ideas of people to recommend.
Paul Lemaire
2024-04-23 12:42:08 +0000 UTCMight be a bit late to the punch here, but I would also like this episode and think Mark Ames from Radio War Nerd might be a good shout, or if not be a great starting point for further recommendations
Toby
2024-04-23 08:36:56 +0000 UTCYes, you would need someone ready to share an approach insightful, uncompromising and subtle enough to dodge both a “tankie” and a “shitlib/neo-con” bias (crudely put). I’ll let you know if I think of candidates that may fit the profile!
Paul Lemaire
2024-03-26 13:07:03 +0000 UTCThis is an incredibly perceptive and lucid comment. I thank you for it. I absolutely agree that an episode on this subject, especially one that doesn’t reduce any of the complexities or inconveniences you identify, would be excellent. An ideal interlocutor would be indispensable, not least bc Matt and are simply not well versed on the subject (even less so than usual!). I’m open to suggestions for the perfect guest; it would have to be someone willing/eager to dwell in the contradictions without resolving them, which far too few commentators on the war are willing to do, including, perhaps especially, the liberals who (understandably but, for our purposes, unfortunately) may know a great deal but have little interest in complicating the story for fear of jeopardizing western sympathy for the Ukrainian cause. (-SAB)
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-26 01:15:35 +0000 UTCThis awesome foreign policy centered episode got me thinking : I know this is a podcast about American conservatism, and I also know Russia can be a dicey subject, but I’m really craving an episode or two about the right wing ideologies in Russia and their influence on the Putin regime, the Russian dissidence, the politics of Ukraine, the 1990s… Not just because of the fascination that Putin's ideology exerts here in the west, but also because there is an explicitly reactionary bend that seems to dominate the whole of post-soviet politics including within the anti-Putin camp, in complicated ways that are somewhat inconvenient to the usual liberal narrative on the subject. For those of us who tend to understand politics through the lens of the right/left spectrum, there is something disorienting about the semantic confusion and ideological shapeshifting at work in the post-soviet world. Putin simultaneously used antifascist and anti-liberal rhetoric to argue for his war, anti-western sentiment and domestic repression. He presents himself at once as an anticommunist traditionalist and a nostalgic of the USSR. He claims to “de-nazify” Ukraine while sending into it the Wagner battalion. The Ukrainian nationalists see themselves as champions of pluralism and liberal democratic principles resisting the military assault of an authoritarian regime, while being in close alliance with skinhead movements who rally around the rehabilitation of pro-nazi pogrom perpetrators. The Azov, and the far right volunteers who have joined their ranks from all over the world, explicitly frame the Ukrainian conflict not so much as a struggle for democracy, but as a crusade to defend the Occident against the invasion of racially Asiatic hordes. There seems to be similar ambiguity at work in the pro-western politics of Navalny, who made his initial reputation as a Putin opponent when he was leading an extreme xenophobic political party, airing campaign ads that would make the wildest MAGA candidates look tame in comparison. And if we look into the life of the other previously prominent dissidents, we find people like Limonov, the “national bolshevik” theoretician of “eurasianism” or Solzhenitsyn who seemed to have ambiguous sentiments about democracy despite his struggle against totalitarianism. Anyway, maybe a tough dive for this podcast but it could be a thrill, what do you say? Not sure who would be the ideal guest…
Paul Lemaire
2024-03-26 00:31:46 +0000 UTCI agree with this—one of those things where it could possibly derail the episode by turning it into a debate about WWI, but it wouldn't have hurt to register our dissent even if briefly. (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-20 12:18:02 +0000 UTCGreat show, thanks everyone. Somewhat besides the point, it’s fascinating to contrast Jacob Heilbrunn’s Dec 2017 piece in the NYRB, Donald Trump’s Brains, about the Claremont Institute defenestrating the likes of the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute from Trump’s court with Sam’s recent article in the NY Times about the latter two’s fights for control of the Trump agenda with nary a mention of the Claremonsters.
Matt Gately
2024-03-18 07:00:41 +0000 UTCLoving the episode so far, but I feel the need to point out that Jacob’s descriptions of Imperial German politics, the Kaiser’s role in German politics, and of Germany’s role in the lead up to WWI are unfortunately out of step with mainstream historical opinion. The Kaiser was almost entirely sidelined in German politics and government after the Daily Telegraph affair, and the “blank check” played a much more peripheral role in the breakout of the First World War than was traditionally understood. Russia and Austria-Hungary had already begun full mobilization and essentially made the decision to go to war at least several days before the “blank check.” This is obviously not to say that Imperial Germany was “good” - their atrocities in Sub-Saharan Africa, in China, and in the Pacific quickly disprove that notion. If anyone’s interested in this, Christopher Clark’s book the Sleepwalkers is a really fantastic and definitive history of the lead up to the First World War. He’s also written a great biography of Wilhelm II (full disclosure: Chris was a professor of mine, albeit one I was not terribly close to).
Andrew Hoppe
2024-03-16 22:58:08 +0000 UTCThat part of the podcast regarding eugenics and pacifism reminded me of David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president: "Jordan’s anti-war beliefs stemmed in large part from eugenic theory. Jordan’s main contribution to eugenic research was on the impact of war on racial health..... Jordan concluded that war, through the deaths of the brave and survival of the cowardly, reduced the overall ability of the race. In his 1915 book “War and the Breed,” for instance, he wrote that “war involves what real students of this subject call ‘reversed selection’ — in which the best are chosen to be killed, and the worst are preserved to be the fathers of the future.” Jordan’s opposition to war was in the name of eugenics in order to prevent the degradation of the race." Source: https://bit.ly/492E51v Malcolm Harris writes about this in his recent book Palo Alto. I hope you can have him on the podcast sometime. Coincidentally, Jordan also likely murdered Jane Stanford with Strychnine. What a guy.
Josue Hurtado
2024-03-15 19:39:51 +0000 UTCAs Sam hinted, one of the reasons pre-communist China was so beloved of the right was that on the whole both the government and people were accepting of missionaries (unlike e.g Japan who kept kicking them out). BTW Jonas Savimbi’s PR in Washington was handed off from Jeanne Kirkpatrick to one Paul Manafort.
Mark K
2024-03-15 02:14:12 +0000 UTCLook up how the capital of North Dakota got its name.
Mark K
2024-03-15 02:06:22 +0000 UTCRecently a South African student at Harvard wrote a piece about Samuel Huntington coming to advise the apartheid government on how to avoid regime change; advice which boiled down to (IIRC) more development, more repression. Which lo and behold was what the government set out to do. It provoked a flurry of reaction back home, including the former president of the SA Political Science Association claiming that his good friend Huntington never met with the government, he merely gave that advice in academic fora (as if that was exonerating). Anyway, I’d love a full episode on the links between conservatism in the US and South Africa and Rhodesia, from support for apartheid through to the Trump-era publicity tours that SA white nationalists did in the US, including appearances on Fox.
Jesse Harber
2024-03-14 07:29:54 +0000 UTCMy FIL worked in foreign policy in DC for a long time as a Republican. He's always been a lovely person to me, and my understanding of his politics is that he considers his Republican politics as being inherited from Lincoln. He opposed apartheid in South Africa and segregation domestically. But then once I made a joke about the US's involvement in the coup in Guatemala in the 50s that bothered him. His reply was something to the effect of "we get a lot of flack for what happened in Guatemala in the 50s, but I think not enough credit for what happened there in the 80s." It was a deeply disquieting moment, and I wish I had asked him about the genocide that had happened there at the time, but the whiplash was too severe. Anyway, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that even in cases where there's divergence from Fix News brain opinions, cold warmongering and embracing fascist strongmen still happens. Also thank you for pointing out how many of these people went to Harvard. It seems like the ostensibly elite institutions were breeding grounds for the most repugnant ideas of the conservative movement (and to whatever ideology Hank Kissinger belonged). The reputations of those universities often seem to shelter bad ideas from valid criticisms. My wife even thinks Harvard is the non-governmental institution responsible for the most bad things of the last 100 years...
Alex
2024-03-14 03:07:21 +0000 UTCI think the segment about Hungary at the end missed the mark. There are draconian anti-immigration policies and culture war shenanigans more or less equal to Orbán’s in other European countries. Where he stands apart is his persistent brinksmanship with the EU and NATO; his *perceived* domestic popularity and power; and to a lesser extent the fact that the guy has fully adopted the grandiose, clash of civilizations language that is so appealing to the CPAC crowd.
Adam
2024-03-14 01:28:00 +0000 UTCGreat ideas, all. Re John Birch… we didn’t get to it in this conversation, though I think we did in one of the Chambers episodes. -SAB
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-13 21:15:10 +0000 UTClol Omg (Biden, the gift that keeps on giving.)
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-13 21:14:15 +0000 UTCNot at all trying to spin this into some kind of gotcha, but… guess who landed in hot water by calling Lee Kuan Yew “the wisest man in the Orient” in 2014?
Nik
2024-03-13 18:45:26 +0000 UTCI may have missed it in the episode, if so I apologize! But when it comes to the right's long obsession with "who lost China," it's worth remembering that the John Birch Society's namesake was martyred at the hands of Chinese Communist troops, the Cold War's "first casualty" as their founding mythology goes. Regarding the affinities between Teddy Roosevelt, his admirers, and Mussolinian fascism, there may be a larger story to tell here regarding the Republican Party's theory of the presidency and how it relates to the right's love of, to put it euphemistically, strong executives. Lincoln, the first Republican president, claimed all kinds of powers on the grounds that the president had the constitutional right to do what it took to preserve the Union in a national emergency (he was right to do this! But think about the scene in the Lincoln movie where he talks about being "cloaked in immense power" as the president - unfortunately, most of Lincoln's successors were not nearly as virtuous as he was). Teddy Roosevelt was literally a man on horseback who thought the president could/should do anything necessary in the "national interest" so long as it wasn't expressly prohibited (and think about the moral and political meanings implied by the idea of a "bully pulpit"). Etc. etc. through George W. Bush's administration and its "unitary executive" theory, and now Trump's attempts to further extend executive power and the personal power of the president. Presidents from both parties have sought to protect and expand their branch's power, of course, and Teddy's cousin Franklin has a lot of responsibility in this field too. But there does seem to be a conservative/GOP preoccupation with executive power that may be, in some sense, related to the topic of the episode. Good one as always, I just requested Heilbrunn's book from the library!
Chris Maisano
2024-03-13 17:33:19 +0000 UTCGreat pod remember trawling around the internet and running into the American Conservative in high school and keeping it on my RSS and then running across VDare so it’s been wild to watch the mainstreaming of Sailer. Definitely grabbing the book.
Chad Stanton
2024-03-13 16:41:06 +0000 UTCThat's an interesting angle, this conversation focused on conservative intellectuals, but a good amount of support for foreign dictators in the 20th century can be explained by identity politics among ethnic voting blocs. In Boston, for example, the Italian-American community was generally favorable to Mussolini until the late 30s, so you'd see Irish pols who represented Italian neighborhoods holding fundraisers for the war effort in Ethiopia! John W. McCormack, the longtime Dem who represented Southie, was a devoted Franco cheerleader in part because of his Catholic base. At one point his more left-leaning aide wanted to write his dissertation on Spain's republican movement, so he banned him from embarrassing his office.
drizzly_november
2024-03-13 13:57:03 +0000 UTCSend us a direct message on here with the email address you want affiliated with the Dissent subscription (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-13 08:52:07 +0000 UTCI kinda think it’d be fun to do an episode at some point on the “Team B” stuff from around this time period! “Actually, there’s no evidence for the super amazing new secret Soviet weapon we say exists because it’s so advanced it evades our detection systems” (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-13 08:23:33 +0000 UTCHi thanks for your work. I just joined, so I’m not sure how to access the membership to Dissent Magazine. Your episodes are very interesting and informative.
Shirley
2024-03-13 00:26:32 +0000 UTCI was surprised Mencken’s German heritage wasn’t mentioned. Also McCarthy’s Wisconsin had a lot of German-American people, and the Bund had a presence in the state pre-WW2. I wonder if there’s a popular parallel to all this that’s more directly ethnic, though I’m not sure it’s relevant to the evolution of the American right.
Blackford Oakes
2024-03-12 21:34:18 +0000 UTCThe comment about the Soviets invading Afghanistan to acquire a warm-water port reminded me of a political science class I took in college in the mid-80s with a visiting professor. A diehard cold warrior, he argued that the US had to combat communism in Cuba, Nicaragua, and a third country I can not remember because they could be staging grounds for a Soviet military invasion of the US. At the time, the argument was puzzling but what did I know? Now, I understand what an absurd idea it was.
Paul Smolinsky
2024-03-12 20:31:46 +0000 UTCThat's a great detail, Rick, I'll remember that one. Grazie! (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-12 19:15:23 +0000 UTCOh, Jacob talks about Simes quite a bit at the start of the book—can't get to everything, at least not if you want it to be listenable, ha. But thanks! (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-12 18:41:53 +0000 UTCThe part about the anti-neocon hole Trump filled: from the 2012 convention, I noted how Colin Powell and Condi gave speeches on America as the indispensable nation, and...crickets.
Rick Perlstein
2024-03-12 16:59:46 +0000 UTCSomething I'm still wondering about (I would kill for an episode on this) especially along the lines of the idea of the Cold War right as an aberration, is how the right's relationship with the current Chinese Communist Party relates to their fondness for authoritarianism. I am very much NOT an expert on contemporary China, but my perception of it's government is of one that could be idealized by the same parts of the right that idealize Putin, Orban, etc. And yet I think (though maybe I'm mistaken), opposition to the CCP remains the leading position, and my immediate take is that it feels very much like a holdover Cold War sentiment. I wonder a lot whether Trump's inconsistency on China (like the recent TikTok thing), is just his being easily influenced and bought off by TikTok investors, or if it points to the difficulty of fitting anti-China positions into an authentically pro-authoritarian (I loved Heilbrunn's phrasing of this) ideology.
David
2024-03-12 16:01:07 +0000 UTCYou guys are absolutely crushing it with these eps recently!
Joel
2024-03-12 13:52:36 +0000 UTCGreat episode and makes me want to pick up the book. Worth noting in passing that Heilbrunn’s former boss at Center for National Interest, Dmitri Simes, is a longtime Putin apologist who went back to Russia after the full-scale invasion and has done thinly veiled PR for the man. Curious to know if seeing that up close influenced Jacob’s choice of subject matter
Sean Keeley
2024-03-12 12:06:46 +0000 UTCThank you both! (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-12 11:42:38 +0000 UTCHa…I first thought you meant Richard Pipes but that is not fair
Thomas Donnelly
2024-03-12 11:20:31 +0000 UTCCPAC being in Hungary was a genuine "Am I crazy or is this the real timeline?" moment. Bizarre and far-fetched. It would be funny if it was fiction
Matthew Bennett
2024-03-12 06:47:32 +0000 UTCSuzanne Massie! She’s still alive, and was granted Russian citizenship by Putin at the end of 2021. Here’s a Newsweek article on her from May of 2021: https://www.newsweek.com/suzanne-massie-ronald-reagan-vladimir-putin-citizen-russia-1592394
Allen
2024-03-12 01:39:12 +0000 UTCIf I’m not mistaken the Emir of Dubai has mentioned Singapore as an inspiration for himself. Anyway, great episode.
Allen
2024-03-12 01:35:12 +0000 UTCI think I *knew* it in my heart but didn’t really realize how much of modern conservatism is based on aesthetic and an inferiority complex because they lack a “homeland”. What a bunch of weirdos.
Christy Kilgore
2024-03-11 23:51:46 +0000 UTCYes! We actually recorded this right around the time I (basically) lost my voice, so it's just one time I got sick! But that spanned a main episode, a bonus episode, and an introduction, which makes it seem like I've been under the weather for a while. The reality is I'm doing *extremely well* in Rome and couldn't have asked for both a more regenerative and productive time in my beloved eternal city. Thank you for the concern, but I promise all is well! (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-11 22:13:17 +0000 UTCI want to know more about the right and the White Russians. Reagan stanned a pop historian who fetishized pre-revolutionary Russia. She even made it into the East Wing and it drove his handlers crazy.
Rick Perlstein
2024-03-11 21:31:12 +0000 UTCIs Matt okay ?
Thomas Donnelly
2024-03-11 19:48:07 +0000 UTCI haven’t listened yet, but I hope there is a discussion of the Right’s fondness for Rhodesia
Thomas Freeman
2024-03-11 18:29:54 +0000 UTC
