Jacob Heilbrunn – författare

From its origins in 1930s Marxism to its unprecedented influence on George W. Bush''s administration, neoconservatism has become one of the most powerful, reviled, and misunderstood intellectual movements in American history. But who are the neocons, and how did this obscure group of government officials, pundits, and think-tank denizens rise to revolutionize American foreign policy?Political journalist Jacob Heilbrunn uses his intimate knowledge of the movement and its members to write the definitive history of the neoconservatives. He sets their ideas in the larger context of the decades-long battle between liberals and conservatives, first over communism, and now over the war on terrorism. And he explains why, in spite of their misguided policy on Iraq, they will remain a permanent force in American politics.From the Trade Paperback edition.

When the networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden on Saturday, November 7, 2020, people from coast to coast exhaled-and danced in the streets. This quick-turnaround volume, a collection of 38 personal essays from writers all over the country-"e;many of America's most thoughtful voices,"e; as Jon Meacham puts it on the back cover-captures the week Trump was voted out, a unique juncture in American life, and helps point toward a way forward to a nation less divided.An eclectic lineup of contributors from Rosanna Arquette to Anthony Scaramucci puts a year of transition into perspective, and summons the anxieties and hopes so many have for better times ahead. As award-winning columnist Mary C. Curtis writes in the lead essay, Saying you re not interested in politics is dangerous because, like it or not, politics is interested in you. Novelist Christopher Buckley, a former speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, laments, The Republican Senate, with one exception, has become a stay of ovine, lickspittle quislings, degenerate descendants of such giants as Everett Dirksen, Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker and John McCain. Nero Award-winning mystery novelist Stephen Mack Jones writes, to Donald Trump, Remember: You live in my house. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is my house. My ancestors built it at a cost of blood, soul and labor. I pay my taxes every year to feed you, clothe you and your family and staff and fly you around the country and the world in my tricked-out private jet. If you violate any aspect of your four-year lease any aspect Lord Jesus so help me, I will do everything in my power to kick yo narrow ass to the curb. As Publisher Steve Kettmann writes in the Introduction: The hope is that in putting out these glimpses so quickly, giving them an immediacy unusual in book publishing, we can help in the mourning for all that has been lost, help in the healing (of ourselves and of our country), and help in the pained effort, like moving limbs that have gone numb from inactivity, to give new life to our democracy. We stared into the abyss, tottered on the edge, and a record-setting surge of voting and activism delivered us from the very real threat of plunging into autocracy.

Why is today’s Republican Party, which claims to be the defender of American values, 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 Jacob Heilbrunn shows, the obvious affection conservatives display for foreign autocrats, though a striking and seemingly inexplicable fact of our current moment, 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 travellers 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.

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 travellers 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.