Jacob Heilbrunn — America Last - with Susan Glasser

Watch author Jacob Heilbrunn's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

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 travelers 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.

Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of the National Interest and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and has written for the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and other outlets. He is the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. He lives in Washington, DC.

Heilbrunn will be in conversation with Susan Glasser. Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington. Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington publications, including Politico, where she founded the award-winning Politico Magazine, and Foreign Policy, which won three National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure as editor in chief. Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was the editor of Outlook and national news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics, spent four years as the Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She edited Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, early in her career. Her books include Kremlin Rising, The Man Who Ran Washington, and, most recently, The Divider, a best-selling history of Donald Trump in the White House, which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker.

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