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In some cases the fans were intellectuals or writers. Buckley excitedly led the charge to defend Francoist Spain and apartheid South Africa (his 1957 pro-Franco missive, “Letter From Spain,” remains nauseating reading seven decades years on). In other cases, the dictators’ cheerleaders were people in positions of real power. Reagan-era fixture Jeane Kirkpatrick worked behind the scenes right in the halls of power to push the agendas of dictators. Even America’s long, close alliance with the United Kingdom was not enough to prevent her from vociferously defending Argentine strongman Leopoldo Galtieri during the Falklands War. With the collapse of the Cold War and its assumptions, there was a brief lull in dictator fandom—after all, liberal democracy had just achieved its long-sought “victory”—but revanchist figures like Pat Buchanan kept the fires burning from outside mainstream conservatism. Buchanan’s antipathy for (mostly Jewish) neoconservatives was flagged as thinly veiled antisemitism even by other illiberal conservatives like Buckley, a charge not easily refuted given Buchanan’s habit of lauding Hitler in print (he was “an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him”).

Finally, Heilbrunn explains, the failure of neoconservative foreign policy (the Iraq disaster) and the global financial crisis put paid to what we might recognize as “normal” conservative politics and left the door wide open for the forces of illiberalism to reassert themselves. George W. Bush’s adventurism in Iraq, none of which went according to the promises his administration made in advance of the invasion, gave powerful ammunition to isolationists of the “old right”; the Buchanan-founded magazine The American Conservative made anti-interventionism the centerpiece of its war on the neocons (in 2022, founding editor Scott McConnell noted that in 2002 ideas like bashing NATO and opposing free trade “seemed nuts,” but two decades on became bedrock Republican principles).

By opening and closing the book with the modern American right’s adulation of Orbán and Putin, Heilbrunn makes clear the stakes and relevance of the historical narrative. We know where a century of dictator-worship leads because the end point is our reality. There is a temptation, then, to drive home a very clear comparison: Mencken, George Sylvester, and Harry Elmer Barnes—interwar-era disdainers of democracy and admirers of what they saw as enlightened despots—map cleanly onto today’s “intellectual dark web” of media-savvy reactionaries. Americans who lauded Mussolini for being brave enough, Heilbrunn writes, to “(dispense) with democracy to defend traditional religion and family values” were using language we hear today in fawning pieces about Orbán or Putin. What is Sinclair Lewis’s character Adelaide Gimmitch in 1935’s It Can’t Happen Here but Moms for Liberty or “Libs of TikTok” for the Depression era?