Danny Postel writes:

The term “America First” is just as confusing and misleading as [Walter] Lippmann [in 1952] argued “isolationism” had become. Its advocates would have us believe that they are merely pursuing a realist foreign policy, one of neutrality and restraint, while in actuality they have dogs in various fights, both between warring countries and inside them. In one breath, they profess indifference about “what’s going on” in faraway lands, and in the next breath, they let slip their fondness for dictators and war criminals. Or, in a sleight of hand, they disavow it. [Tucker] Carlson is more loose-lipped than JD Vance but they are kindred ideological spirits to the core. Vance has said that he is “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” Affinities for Putin, the AfD and other far-right parties and leaders are pervasive in those subcultures.

This ambiguity goes back to the America First Committee in 1940, which was formed to oppose U.S. entry into World War II. In principle, the argument was for neutrality: Let the Europeans fight it out. It doesn’t concern us. And the committee appealed to people across the ideological spectrum. Its adherents included pacifists and socialists. But the body’s most visible member, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, openly sympathized with the Nazis and promoted the regime’s propaganda, as did other prominent spokespeople for the cause. Eventually, this drove away the committee’s progressive and centrist supporters and damaged its reputation nationally. The body collapsed under the weight of these contradictions, dissolving in 1941.

These contradictions have bedeviled “America First” nationalism from its inception and remain present to this day. In his recent book “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators,” the political writer Jacob Heilbrunn examines conservative enthusiasm for the German emperor Wilhelm II during World War I, for Mussolini in the 1920s and Hitler in the 1930s, for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and Chilean General Augusto Pinochet, and for apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Heilbrunn emphasizes that while conservatives often frame their position on issues like Ukraine in realist terms, the actual motivation goes unacknowledged. They often blame NATO expansion for pushing Putin into a corner, but such complaints are “not about foreign policy realism,” Heilbrunn argues. Rather, they are rooted in real admiration for Putin — for his disdain for LGBTQ rights, for his support for the Russian Orthodox church, and for his cult of masculinity.” [Continue reading…]