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Tucker Carlson and the Right's Love

Affair with Dictators
Ideas
February 29, 2024 7:00 AM EST
Republican foreign policy hawks are going on the warpath. After Tucker Carlson recently
traveled on his mission to Moscow to interview Russian president Vladimir Putin, former
Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger called him a “traitor.” And after former president
Donald Trump remained silent about the murder of Russian opposition leader Alexei
Navalny, the presidential candidate and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley told
Fox News that “it’s amazing…how weak in the knees he is when it comes to Putin.”
Actually, it isn’t. An infatuation with foreign dictators has formed a durable strand of the
conservative movement, one dating back over a century. Again and again, many on the
right, much like the far left fellow-travelers who worshipped despots such as Joseph Stalin
or Fidel Castro, have latched upon foreign authoritarians as models for how to reshape
American society domestically. The result has not simply been neutrality toward but
outright admiration for some of the worst tyrants in modern history, including Benito
Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and Augusto Pinochet.
This veneration has its sources in World War I, when leading figures on the right such as
the well-known journalist H.L. Mencken and the publicist George Sylvester Viereck
championed the cause of illiberal imperial Germany, denounced democratic Great Britain
and opposed American entry into the conflict. Mencken viewed liberal democracy as
tantamount to mob rule and later backed what he called an “intelligent fascism.” Mencken
pioneered many of the arguments that the right would use in coming decades. He argued
that President Woodrow Wilson and globalists were conspiring to creating a deep state
that would mire America in a senseless conflict. After visiting Germany in 1917, he declared
in the Atlantic that General Erich von Ludendorff, who would march with Hitler in the
abortive 1923 Beer Hall putsch, was the country’s “national messiah.”
After World War I ended, the right fomented numerous revisionist works about the war that
blamed America for it. The prominent conservative Albert Jay Nock, for example,
published a book about Germany with a title that said it all: The Myth of a Guilty Nation.
This revisionism helped set the stage in September 1940 for the establishment of the
America First movement, which had 800,000 members and was championed by the famed
former aviator Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh and others didn’t simply support isolationist
policies but were actively sympathetic toward Nazi Germany which they viewed as a vital
ally in the struggle against Stalin’s Soviet Union. They wanted America to align itself with
fascism. Indeed, in an incendiary speech called “Who Are the War Agitators” in Des
Moines, Iowa in September 1941, Lindbergh created a national furor by declaring that “the
three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the
British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.”
The Nazi government directly enmeshed itself in American politics, using American agents
such as George Sylvester Viereck to influence Congress. Senators such as Ernest
Lundeen pleaded the Nazi case and Viereck was eventually imprisoned for traitorous
activities. Others confined their efforts to pushing the German cause in speeches and
pamphlets. The Chicago activist Elizabeth Dilling, who was known as the “Female Fuhrer”
in Germany, lauded Hitler as restoring order. Others on the right such as the anti-Semitic
Father Coughlin, who was the host of a popular weekly radio show, hailed Spain’s
Francisco Franco as a defender of western Christendom. And the reactionary New York
businessman Merwin K. Hart, a former classmate of Franklin Roosevelt’s at Harvard,
announced in a speech at the Union League Club in New York that it was “time to brush
aside this word `democracy’”—drawing a public rebuke from Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney
General Robert Jackson.
After World War II, the anti-interventionist right was largely discredited but dictators
remained an object of perennial fascination. Take William F. Buckley, Jr. This conservative
icon and his brethren at National Review praised the apartheid system in South Africa as
well as the brutal regime of Chile’s Pinochet. After traveling to Chile on a junket, Buckley
lauded Pinochet as “big-chested, penetrating eyes, the faint glimmer of suspicion there…
regal, is another way to put it.”
Then there was Patrick J. Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon administration and fiery
opponent of globalism. Pitchfork Pat, as he was known, campaigned twice for the
Republican nomination for the presidency in 1992 and 1996 and won a nationwide
following for his unvarnished anti-Washington message. Buchanan opposed entry into
World War I and World War II as well as free trade and immigration. He also was regularly
accused of antisemitism, defended apartheid South Africa and the southern confederacy,
and wrote a syndicated column in 1977 that referred to Hitler as “a soldier’s soldier.”
After the Cold War ended, Buchanan became the chief promoter of Putin’s Russia as a
bastion of manly Christian values and hostility to gay rights. In 2013, he asked whether
Putin was “one of us?” A year later, Putin invaded Crimea and former New York city mayor
Rudy Giuliani contrasted him favorably with President Barack Obama—“that’s what you
call a leader.” Buchanan, too, was impressed. In 2017, he declared, “Putin puts Russia first.”
What once seemed like a radical stance has now become the new normal in the GOP. A
number of Republican legislators fell over themselves to praise Carlson’s fawning interview
with Putin. Rep. Clay Higgins gushed that Putin is a “studied man of resolute spirit.”
Senator Tommy Tuberville declared that Putin is “on the top of his game” and appeared to
be ready for peace in Ukraine, unlike the “warmongers” in Washington. What’s more,
Trump refused to mention Navalny’s name before eventually likening himself to the
murdered dissident leader, while House speaker Mike Johnson stymies vital financial and
military aid to Ukraine, much as the America Firsters in the early 1940s claimed that Great
Britain was bound to go down to defeat and that any aid was a waste of American
resources. Finally, the revelation that Russian intelligence agents guided the main
informant in the Hunter Biden case more than a little redolent of German spying and
disinformation efforts before World War II.
None of this seems to unduly perturb the new Putin wing in the GOP, which represents
what Rep. Matt Gaetz rightly calls a “generational shift in my party” from the
establishment to a younger advance guard. Right now, Gaetz and his ideological comrades
are in control—and they aren’t about to give it up any time soon. Maybe the surprising
thing isn’t that the contemporary GOP is morphing into an ally of the likes of Hungarian
prime minister Viktor Orban or Putin. It’s that it took this long to occur.
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