America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

Jacob Heilbrunn

Feb 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Kent Klineman

About this audiobook

In America Last, Jacob Heilbrunn, a highly respected observer of the American Right, demonstrates that the infatuation of American conservatives with foreign dictators is not a new phenomenon. It dates to WWI, 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 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.

About the author

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.

Kent Klineman is a voice actor and narrator based in Los Angeles. A Tony Award winner, Kent has acted in regional theater and on Broadway. He recently guest starred for the second time on FX's hit show Better Things.