Beverly Gage, a professor of history at Yale University and the author of a recent biography of J. Edgar Hoover, recently took to the pages of Foreign Affairs to present her and Jacob Heilbrunn’s version of the history of the far Right in 20th-century America to explain why conservatives embrace foreign tyrants.
She accepts Heilbrunn’s idea that modern conservatism is “rooted … in a sincere affinity” and “admiration” for “brutal, often racist authoritarians” dating back to “Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II up to the apartheid government of South Africa.” Gage’s “history” supposedly explains why Donald Trump’s “explicit racism” and “‘America first’ nativism” has captured the Republican Party.
Gage’s “history” is left-wing history that maligns conservatism and ignores the allure of autocracy on the Left, which includes what Jean-François Revel called the “totalitarian temptation.”
‘Deeply Catholic’ Americans to Blame for ‘Autocratic Allure’?
Gage mentions a few on the Right who, in the 1920s and 1930s, expressed admiration for Mussolini and Hitler. “Some,” she writes, “were deeply Catholic,” while others were racists. Some on the far right saw autocrats as a way to “protect traditional Christianity, or patriarchal families, or even just the idea of hierarchy itself.” You can see where this is going. The allure of autocracy is to be found, according to Gage, in “deeply Catholic” Americans who oppose abortion, cherish the traditional nuclear family, oppose the left’s woke agenda at home and their neoliberal approach to foreign policy. (READ MORE: Trump Is an Extraordinary Manager of Client Nations)
Gage traces the right’s “autocratic allure” to William F. Buckley, Jr. and National Review, and expresses surprise that such right-wing admirers of autocracy could emerge from her beloved Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. She calls this group “right-wing” dissidents and “high-born pseudo-intellectuals” — because her cherished Ivy League is supposed to produce only enlightened members of the leftist elite. She includes among the right-wing Ivy League dissidents Buckley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Josh Hawley, Sen. J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Donald Trump.
Buckley and others at National Review, Gage writes, were admirers of Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco whose forces won the Spanish Civil War over the communist-controlled Republican forces in the mid-to-late 1930s. Franco saved Spain from the Stalinist forces and during the war refused to ally with Hitler’s Germany. Perhaps Gage thinks Spain would have been better off if the Stalinists had won — they, after all, were supported by many leftist intellectuals. (READ MORE: Trump, Not Harris, Has ‘Strategic Realism’ in Spades)
Indeed, as Paul Hollander has documented, leftist intellectuals spent much of the 20th century supporting the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and other communists. They fell prey to the “totalitarian temptation” that an elite, intellectual cadre could transform mankind into a workers’ paradise. The left, not the right, supported the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century, yet Gage accuses the right of having an autocratic allure.
History Teaches Leftist Intellectuals Have Their Own ‘Totalitarian Temptation’
And let us not forget that it was the Democratic Party of the defeated Confederacy that founded the Ku Klux Klan and imposed Jim Crow laws throughout much of the South. And it was powerful Democratic politicians like Richard Russel and Lyndon Johnson who ensured the defeat of anti-lynching laws throughout more than half of the 20th century. Perhaps Gage should read or re-read Robert Caro’s masterful account of this in his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson.
Was it the autocratic allure that led the Ivy Leaguer and notorious racist Woodrow Wilson to prosecute and imprison his political opponents who spoke out against America’s entry into the First World War? For that matter, was it the autocratic allure that led Ivy Leaguer Franklin Roosevelt to unjustly remove persons of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and transport them to camps further inland? Or that led FDR to use the IRS against his political opponents? Was it the autocratic allure that led Ivy Leaguers John and Robert Kennedy to be complicit in the overthrow and resultant assassination of South Vietnam’s leader Diem or to attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba? (READ MORE: The Sun Sets on Britain)
As far as embracing dictators, no American president ever courted a foreign leader the way Ivy Leaguer Franklin Roosevelt courted Stalin during the Second World War. Gage should read Robert Nisbet’s Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship, which shows FDR repeatedly ridiculing Winston Churchill to gain favor with the murderous Soviet dictator, and conspiring to cover up Stalin’s responsibility for the murder of 15,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.
And who could forget the liberal Ivy Leaguer Barack Obama going on an apology tour to seek forgiveness for America’s past sins from Iran’s clerical autocrats? Obama’s apology tour proceeded to Latin America, including communist Cuba. Was Obama also stricken by the autocratic allure?
Gage near the end of her essay even gets a dig in at Ronald Reagan for appointing Jeane Kirkpatrick (who received an Ivy League postgraduate degree at Columbia), who “made the case that Washington should cozy-up to right-wing autocrats,” as his U.N. ambassador. Kirkpatrick understood, even if Gage does not, that authoritarian regimes allow more freedoms than totalitarian regimes, and are more likely than totalitarian regimes to evolve into democracies.
Reagan, who opposed abortion, supported the traditional nuclear family, had many traditional Catholics in his administration, and lacked an Ivy League degree, somehow liberated half a continent from communist rule without firing a shot. So much for conservatism’s “autocratic allure.”
