Jacob Heilbrunn & Damir Marusic
On Thursday, March 28 at 4:30 PM in Lawrence Hall Room 105, Damir Marusic, Assignment Editor at the Washington Post and host of the podcast and Substack Wisdom of Crowds will interview and debate Jacob Heilbrunn on his new book, America Last (Liveright, 2024).
In America Last, Heilbrunn, a leading observer of the right, explains the long history behind Donald Trump’s admiration for Vladimir Putin and Ron DeSantis’s veneration of Victor Orban. Why is today’s Republican Party, 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 Heilbrunn shows, the affection conservatives display for foreign autocrats 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 travelers 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.
Heilbrunn is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and editor of the National Interest, a foreign policy magazine that was founded by Irving Kristol in 1985. He began his career as an assistant editor at the magazine, where his first issue was one featuring Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” essay. He went on to become a senior editor at the New Republic and an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and the Weekly Standard.