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- [00:00]
A
Dan I'm Dan Kurtz Phelan, and this is the Foreign affairs interview.
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B
We have an election which actually, somewhat unusually for U.S. history, has pretty clear distinctions about how the U.S. is supposed to behave in the world and what U.S. foreign policy ought to be. And I think people care about that.
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A
When Donald Trump praises foreign autocrats, from Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un to Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, the tip difficult reaction is shock and dismay. And that is just one of the unsettling features of American civic life today that has a more prominent place in our history than most observers would like to think. But in fact, Beverly Gage points out in a recent essay in Foreign affairs, such admiration is not uncommon in American politics. Gage, a historian at Yale, spoke with my colleague Kanish Tharoor about the historical parallels that help us understand today's fraught politics as well as what sets this moment apart.
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C
Beverly Gage, it's a pleasure to talk to you.
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B
Thanks for having me here.
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C
We're speaking just a few weeks before what promises to be a very momentous election day here in the United States. And there's this supposed truism that US Presidential elections are never about foreign policy. That's not entirely true. I think there are many cases in which understandings of America's role in the world have influenced the outcomes of elections. We can think of Eisenhower in 1952 or Nixon in 68, Reagan in 1980, maybe even Obama in 2008, and so on. This election is taking place at what seems like an incredibly fraught moment in geopolitics, with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle east, the rising competition with China, the stakes seem so immense. How do you see questions of foreign policy helping to frame the current election?
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B
I think you're right that the conventional wisdom that voters vote on their pocketbooks or their cultural identities or domestic politics isn't entirely right. I would say it's safe to say that voters don't usually go to the polls looking at the fine points of kind of NATO policy. But I do think that voters have responded on many occasions, first of all, to wars as they are underway and to a sense of whether or not the US is engaging in a competent way, in a thoughtful way, in a way that resonates with a certain set of values at home. And then they have also kind of engaged with the grand narrative that candidates present about who this country is, how it's supposed to act in the world. And I think we're seeing both of those play out here. You know, I will leave it to the pollsters to determine what's really in the hearts of every voter out there and whether or not, say, the way that the war in Afghanistan ended or these very hot conflicts that are going on around the world, whether those are more important or less important than inflation, let's say. But I do think that we have an election which actually, somewhat unusually for U.S. history, has pretty clear distinctions about how the U.S. is supposed to behave in the world and what U.S. foreign policy ought to be. And I think people care about that. They care about the question of the use of military power. They care about, certainly, the conflict in the Middle east and Ukraine.
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C
Above all, we published an essay recently by the political scientists Jeffrey Friedman and Andrew Payne that argued that foreign policy does matter in presidential elections, at least insofar as voters perceive candidates to be strong. Do you think either candidate has offered a plausible vision or, you know, at least a sort of plausible impression of strength in the world?
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B
Well, I think they present really contrasting views of what it means to be strong. Right, right. Donald Trump's vision of what it means to be strong has always had a kind of bullying quality. Right. A go it alone trumping around, whether that's in domestic politics or in global affairs. And I think, obviously, Kamala Harris has a very different and contrasting view of what strength looks like. Right. Strength through alliances, strength through a certain kind of restraint, strength through a kind of confidence in what it is that the United States is and what it stands for around the world. You know, I think one of the things that is really disturbing on the long list of things that are really disturbing about Donald Trump, but has been his very, very consistent view, kind of that the United States is done for, that it's a declining nation, that it's an embarrassment, that it's a laughing stock around the world. And. And that's just a very, very peculiar position for a presidential candidate to take. And that position I don't think we have many precedents for in US History.
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C
The Harris campaign has styled Trump's, let's say, his willingness to speak positively about foreign tyrants as evidence of his unsuitability to be a world leader. Do you think that's an effective strategy?
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B
Well, I guess we're about to find out if that's an effective strategy. But I do think what's really interesting about him as a candidate is not just a kind of necessary evil set of alliances with dictators, which is, you know, the United States has a long and complicated history of cozying up to all sorts of dictators. So that is not that Unusual in either a presidential candidate or in the U.S. government. I think what is unusual and what really distinguishes Trump is that he is holding them up as figures of affirmative admiration. Right. That Putin knows more about how to be in the world than Joe Biden does. And that is a pretty wild thing to say.
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C
Let's get into that. Your last essay for us, which is a really wonderfully written piece titled the Autocratic Allure. This piece is about a book by the journalist Jacob Heilbronn called America Lost. And in this book, Heilbron sort of explores the admiration that many people on the American right in the 20th century had for dictators and authoritarians. A real cast of horribles, from Kaiser Wilhelm ii, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and so on. There are many observers, and not just Heilbronn, have connected this tradition to the present, as you suggested, when some conservatives seemed really fascinated by the figure of Putin or indeed by Viktor Orban in Hungary. What do you think drew those figures in the 20th century to authoritarians and Trump and his allies now to the likes of Putin and Orban? Maybe another way to put this would be, what do we learn about what these figures want for America from their admiration for foreign authoritarians?
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B
You know, I think what is really valuable about Heilbronn's book is that he makes this powerful distinction between kind of realist geopolitics of one sort or another, which, as we were just saying, has often led American politicians of a variety of sorts to have pretty close and sometimes even, you know, kind of grudgingly admiring relationships with totalitarians, authoritarians of all sorts. But I think what he's really interested in is a set of kind of cultural resonances. And those, to me, seem really very powerful and very much a part of what Trump's doing. So some of that is just a kind of attraction to a world that is hierarchical, Right. Where certain people are at the top and others are at the bottom. And you have this kind of vision of a hierarchical society. I think a lot of it has to do with masculinity and this vision of what it means to be a strong man, as we were saying, as well as a strong man. Right. And then I think you have other factors, like a certain kind of religiosity and a vision of a hierarchical religious state. And then, of course, race is one of the key characteristics. A lot of the figures that Heilbron cites in his book were race theorists of one sort or another, as they would have been described in the early 20th century. And of course, the same holds true for gender. Right. It's a kind of patriarchal vision writ large, not only for the family but for the nation. So I think it's those kind of, you know, cultural resonances, which are of course also political, that really distinguish this particular right wing tradition.
- [09:16]
C
You make a further distinction in your essay where you say that where these sympathies were largely fringe for much of the 20th century, they're decidedly in the mainstream now. You write, what distinguishes the present moment from the past is that these ideas have eventually captured a US President Trump, along with one of the country's two major political parties, the Republican Party. The 20th century was actually quite different from the 21st, and it feels as if the United States is now heading into uncharted territory. You're a historian, I imagine you're often asked to trace both continuity and change. Why do you see so much change here?
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B
Well, I think it's because these ideas have an institutional power as well as a kind of powerful figurehead, and that is both powerful in the American imagination and then also potentially once again powerful in the White House, that have given them not just a kind of cultural prominence or resonance as they've had at various points in the past, but a real institutional base from which to begin to realize some of these ideas and from which to influence lots of other people. So I think about a figure like Henry Ford, incredibly powerful cultural figure. He is an isolationist in World War I, and then in the immediate aftermath, he's a kind of peace advocate, but in a very strange way. And he's of course a notorious anti Semite. And what's interesting about Henry Ford is that he's, you know, the richest man in the world or one of them enormously popular, heroic figure. But when he ran for Congress, he, in 1918, he lost. Right. And so he never actually got into the political system in some overt way. Or a figure like Charles Lindbergh. Right. Same kind of story. Or even a figure like William F. Buckley in the post war years. Right. Enormously kind of powerful thinker and influencer, as we would call him today, but not someone who ever had organized political power. And that's what makes this moment different.
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C
Is it too large a question to ask what enabled that turn to happen?
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B
I would point to a few different things, but these are all just sort of by way of historians speculation rather than any fully realized theory. One is certainly the end of the Cold War and the end of many of the forces that sort of pushed the establishment together in some way, particularly around questions of foreign policy, but, you know, fueled certain kinds of right wing politics. Also served to kind of provide a check on those right wing politics around something like civil rights. Right. The idea that the Cold War really pushed the country to remain within certain boundaries or to make certain kinds of changes. So that's one piece I would point to. And then in some ways, I really think we're talking about the declining power of the political parties as institutions. And there's a funny thing that's happened in which the country has become much more partisan, but the parties are much less institutionally powerful. And I think a lot of that goes back to some of the reforms that came out of the 1970s in particular, like the way that we choose our presidential candidates now. Right. I mean, until the 1970s, you simply could not have gotten a figure like Trump at the head of a major political party because he didn't have an institutional base, he an insider. And it was all about kind of making the party convention work for you. So that had problems, but it also provided certain checks. Right. And one of those checks was kind of preventing an outside demagogue from coming in and kind of sweeping through the popular primary and then capturing the party.
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C
You know, we're talking about the American right, but I wonder to what extent you can find on the left a similar kind of traditional, maybe not in scale, but certainly in orientation. You know, you can think of figures like Henry Wallace in the 1940s who was, you could say, was guilty of certain level of Soviet apologia, down to leftists in the present who offer apologies for Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela or Bashar Al Assad in Syria and so forth. Do you see anything equivalent to what we've been discussing occurring on the left as well?
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B
Well, again, I think there are left traditions, so there's an anti militarist tradition, there's a certain form of isolationism, there's an anti war tradition on the left. And all of those things have been quite powerful at various times and sometimes have actually had some overlap with the right, even a left wing anti statist tradition of varying sorts. But I don't think that we have seen anything in the kind of left liberal spectrum like what you're seeing now on the right largely because of this question of who holds power. Right. So you can point to relatively powerless, you know, left wing campus protesters who might be making some of the arguments that you're referring to. Or in the 1930s and 40s, you could certainly find people in the Communist Party who were apologists for Stalin. I mean, you could certainly find that into the 50s and even into the 60s and 70s in some cases, but those were not people who held a whole lot of significant political power. I mean, even Henry Wallace, it was an important campaign, but he got almost no votes.
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C
Right, so 2.4%.
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B
Right, exactly.
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C
You've gestured at this a little bit, but the counterargument to sort of Heilbron's accusations from Trump's allies, and maybe indeed Trump himself, is that they're actually being realists, and that's certainly how they characterize their positions on Ukraine. How many people would explain Cold War era policies of cozying up to dictators? The idea that they're sort of dealing with the world as it is, not as liberals would want it to be. Do you find that credible?
- [15:44]
B
I think there is a certain element of credibility to that, which is to say I don't think they are in any danger of succumbing to grand visions of American ideals or of nation building or of democracy building, which are sometimes virtuous and are often things that have led policymakers astray certainly in recent years. But I think where it doesn't resonate is exactly in the places that Heilbron is talking about, which is you've got these incredibly powerful cultural, social, political affinities. Right. Everything from kind of the global anti trans alliance. Right. Is that realism of sort? I don't think so. Right. Or, you know, particularly around questions of race and gender and religion and all of those pieces which. Which is really the source, I think, of Trump's admiration for some of the figures we've been talking about. Right.
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C
You made this point that many of the grievances of the US Right today, Wokeness, the deep state LGBTQ issues and so on, are also preoccupations of foreign autocrats like Putin and Orban and Hungary. And they've made those messages sort of central to their regimes as well. How do these ideas sort of circulate, and why are they so powerful in very different contexts?
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B
One thing that I would say is that none of these are particularly new ideas. Maybe the particular articulation of kind of anti trans or particular ways of describing Wokeness. The language and the trappings might seem relatively new, but these are deep and lasting ideas about racial and gender hierarchy, about the power of a centralized state that have never gone away. And I think one of the interesting things was that what is also a historical phenomenon is the ability of liberals in particular to forget this over and over and over again. And to assume that certain pernicious ideas have been put to bed. Nobody would say such things. Nobody would do such things. Right. Kind of constantly declaring victory and then being shocked once again when a figure espousing these ideas not only emerges on the stage, but turns out to have a big popular constituency. Because, of course, if you think about it, one context, right, the Ku Klux Klan and the massive resistance movement against civil rights in the 1960s in particular, what happened, the United States passed civil rights legislation. We had formal desegregation. All sorts of things occurred to make real progress on civil rights. But the people who joined those organizations and who believed those things didn't suddenly evaporate. Right. And this is actually, you know, I used to run the grand strategy program here at Yale, and this was one of the big places where I saw deep resonance between a kind of geopolitical question of grand strategy and a domestic political question, which is the once you win, what do you do with your opponents? Right. And I think that's a very powerful question in a kind of post conflict situation. But it's a question that domestic politicians don't seem to think much about. Right. Once you've won, you've won and they've disappeared on some level. And of course, that's. That's never really the case.
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C
We'll be back after a short break. And now back to my conversation with Beverly Gage. You know, the figure you often cite as the precursor to this Trumpian era, you call him the spiritual progenitor of this era, is Senator Joseph McCarthy. Why is that?
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B
Well, I think that McCarthy really created a new political style in the United States that had earlier resonances. But that is also, I think he's the best analog to Trump in our history. Of course, he didn't become president, so that's a big difference. Usually when people talk about McCarthy these days, they're sort of talking in some general way about anti communism and about the red scare. But McCarthy actually occupied a very particular position within that politics. Everyone in the 1950s with any legitimacy in American politics is an anti communist. But McCarthy's role was to be this kind of slash and burn figure. And people in the 1950s often described him very much in the same terms that people today describe Trump. He went for the big lie, he went for the headline. And when he made the headline and people called him out on it because nothing he said was true, he either ignored them or he just moved on to the next big lie. And everyone scrambled to respond to that and to fact check him and to denounce him, but he was the one sort of in control of the news cycle. He was described as a demagogue. And when people talked about McCarthyism in the 1950s, that's really what they were talking about. They were talking about this kind of big lie form of showy demagoguery that was also about a kind of aggressive and punitive targeting of your political opponents, humiliating of your political opponents, threatening your political opponents with jail time or exposure or whatever it might be. And that all just seems very, very trumpy. And of course, they had a friend in common, Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy's counsel, another kind of notorious figure of the American right, who was also Donald Trump's kind of counsellor and mentor.
- [21:47]
C
McCarthyism grafted the sort of major geopolitical tension of the time, the Cold War fears of communism, onto domestic politics. Do you see any kind of parallel for that dynamic today?
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B
Well, I don't think that we have any issue today that has either the cultural or political power that communism had in that moment. So I think we have division around geopolitics and geopolitical conflicts of varying sorts. So I think there are variations of kind of McCarthyite strategies. Certainly we saw that with campus presidents and campus protesters this last year, in which you say one thing, it gets blown up, there's a kind of rush of outrage, and then people are losing their jobs, they're afraid to say things. So that has some resonance with this earlier period. But I think nothing today has the same power of mobilization or the same power of kind of consensus making in some sense that communism did then to
- [22:54]
C
reach toward another historical parallel. We are sort of exactly a century removed from the Johnson Reid act that severely restricted immigration for about three decades in this country. It was an act that was motivated by the most pernicious forms of race, science and anti immigrant hysteria. And Senator David Reid, one of its proponents, was also an avowed fan of Mussolini. Now we have Trump, one of the most powerful men in the world, former US President, inveighing against immigrants, talking about how they have bad genes and are poisoning the blood of American society. You've spent a lot of time thinking about the 1920s and the interwar period. In what ways does it help us understand our present moment?
- [23:42]
B
I think it's one of the most important past touchstones, certainly for immigration politics today, but for much broader political questions too. So in 1924, and I think many Americans still don't quite realize this, but from 1924 all the way to the 1960s, immigration into the US was heavily, heavily restricted. And it was restricted according to a kind of hierarchy of desirability. And that hierarchy of desirability had a lot to do with race. So the 1924 act basically banned immigration from Africa and Asia, parts of the Middle east, heavily restricted it from southern and Eastern Europe where all the Jews and the Catholics were. And favored immigrants from northern Europe, though, gave them quotas too.
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C
Right.
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B
So. And it was a dramatic change. So, you know, I think one of the things that's interesting about it is that it came out of this period of really dramatic and in some ways kind of historically unprecedented in other countries, mass immigration that was the story of the late 19th and early 20th century in the US so it wasn't a response to nothing, in the same way that I think the anti immigration politics today is also not a response to nothing, which is to say we are back at immigration levels that look a lot like what they did in the early 20th century, that people are coming from very, very different parts of the world, but percentage wise, they're almost comparable. So it would be a little surprising if there were no reaction to that whatsoever. This is, of course, a particularly pernicious reaction, and it has a lot of resonances not only with the kind of race hierarchies that were so important in 1924, but, you know, I think an underappreciated part of the 1924 law was that those were also supposed to be parts of the world where dangerous radicals and terrorists came from. So. And that was a lot of what that politics was about, too. So around those questions of kind of political subversion or terrorists sneaking across our borders, that was pretty important in the twenties, although you were talking about communist revolutionaries or anarchists from Italy, et cetera,
- [26:10]
C
tied to this panic about migrants. There's also a lot of rhetoric from Trump and his vice presidential candidate, J.D. vance about elites. And this is something we hear also in Europe as well, but also both on the right and the left. In the last decade, we've seen a rise in railing against the elites, whatever that might mean. And often the most strident critics of the elites are people who are inextricably tied to those very economic and cultural classes. And so we see, you know, a slew of Ivy Leaguers in the United States or Oxbridge grads in the UK Bashing the elites today much in the way, as you've pointed out, William F. Buckley did in the 1950s. Do you see something new in today's politics of anti elitism, or is it just another chapter in an old story.
- [27:01]
B
It was funny, as I was reading the Heilbronn book, I started writing in the margins. So partly because I teach at Yale, I would sort of circle when some pernicious right wing figure came out of Yale. But I found that I was circling things every two or three pages in that book. Yale, Harvard, Columbia, all of these elite institutions that are not only producing figures of the right, but that are producing men who make their careers based on denouncing the very institutions, at least in higher education, that shaped them. And it's a very consistent type. It's a rather peculiar type. And I think it's all over our politics now, right? We have J.D. vance and Josh Hawley and Vivek Ramaswamy and Trump himself, who is an Ivy League educated figure, right? He went to Penn. And so I would say that a little bit of what's different in this moment, if anything, is that there are so many of them that it's becoming so central to the politics. I mean, in Buckley's day, that was a kind of, you know, jokey insider, outsider position to take, right? Buckley simply could not abide Yale, Right. And all of these corrupt elites there. And yet he came here and talked all the time. He left his papers to Yale, right? It was like there was a kind of I'm a provocateur within. Whereas now I don't really think that that is the case anymore. And I think the power of that kind of anti elite sentiment has grown much more significant, right? It's much more central to the mainstream of the Republican Party now. That's not Donald Trump. I think that's Ronald Reagan. I mean, he was the kind of avatar and creator of the modern form of that kind of politics.
- [29:02]
C
I wonder if we could widen the aperture a bit and look beyond the United States. You know, history obviously is a very contested ground in US Politics right now. Just look at the fallout of the Times 1619 project, which incurred and continues to incur the wrath of a lot on the political right and elsewhere too. But, you know, history has also featured quite prominently in recent nationalist and authoritarian projects elsewhere. I'm thinking of, say, the supposed neo Ottomanism of Erdogan in Turkey of India under Narendra Modi, its interest in reviving the notion of Hindu civilizational identity. You see something similar in China as well under Xi Jinping, Putin's desire to sort of resurrect the Russian Empire of old and so on. Societies are always reshaping the way they understand their shared pasts. But is there a reason why we seem to be looking behind us so much these days?
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B
Well, I think it's related to the rise of a certain kind of nationalism more broadly. Right. I mean, nationalism has always been, at least in part, about creating a historical narrative about why these people should be in this polity and these people should be excluded and why that's the right and natural thing to do. And so I think history, in some ways, is a kind of methodology of nationalism, and that's one reason we're seeing so much history now. I think it's also, you know, to return to the US Context a little bit and the stories that I know best. But we're also, I think, in a moment of kind of deep confusion where certain narratives that had a lot of power in the past, historical narratives, have broken down in one way or another. Right. So the narrative of American progress, Right. Which had good parts and bad parts, but was the narrative of the United States for a whole lot of its history, is, I think, a narrative that people don't have a lot of faith in anymore. And so there's a lot of searching for other ways of understanding history. I think, you know, groups in the United States that are trying to make their claims on the nation, whether in terms of reparations or inclusion, are also busy excavating their own pasts in order to make those claims. So I think that a historical story is often a political story, and it's a story that is about access to a certain kind of power, and there's a lot of instability right now. And so people are really kind of looking back to find these claims. I would also say many people are, I think, asking, like, do we live in the worst moment? And kind of desperately seeking examples from the past that will either be confirming or reassuring. I want to assure everyone that we do not, in fact, live in the worst moment. There are many, many worse moments in human history. But I think there is a kind of emotional volatility to politics today that people are being propelled to kind of look for examples, to kind of ground themselves in what's happening.
- [32:26]
C
You've actually brought us to where I wanted to close today, which is to touch on your recent essay in the Atlantic, where you lament how American liberals and also those on the left are wary of embracing American history for some of the reasons you've suggested and, you know, of using its origin story and have sort of seeded its symbols to the right. You actually quote an essay that the historian Jill Lepore wrote for us five years ago in Foreign affairs when she wrote Writing national history creates plenty of problems, but not writing national history creates more problems, and those problems are worse. You've sort of sketched why that has happened, but how would you like to see that history reclaimed or that narrative represented to people now?
- [33:14]
B
That essay was sort of a preview of 2026, which is going to be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and so is going to be, whether people know it or not yet, a period of lots of historical hoopla, national self searching and fireworks and whatever. But it's, but it's all still information. And one of the things that has been really disturbing to me over, I'd say, the last 10 to 20 years is the way that so many symbols of the United States, and especially of the founding era, have been claimed by and are now coded as right wing, right? So Trump rallies, American flags are everywhere, right? People are decked out in them as if that's the only thing that the American flag means. And so that essay goes into lots of examples from the past where people from the left deliberately crafted and chose certain parts of the American political tradition to make their case that actually they own the United States. Right? And I think in our moment, it's not only that the historical symbolism has been taken up in what I think are sort of partisan and distorted and disturbing ways, but it's also that there's kind of a little bit of hesitation and allergy to even trying to think about what you might celebrate at all. So when I was writing that article and I went around talking to people and mentioning it and saying 2026 is coming, you know, big celebration of America, they go like, oh, no, I don't want any part of it. I don't want to celebrate anything. And I think, you know, there are a lot of terrible things that have happened in American history and a lot of reasons why people feel that way. But as a politics as well, as a matter of history, I just don't think that, that it is either accurate or productive. And I would like to see some sort of reimagining of what these symbols mean and of finding a kind of usable past out of the American story.
- [35:30]
C
On that note, thank you so much for your time. It's always so great to learn from you and to hear from you.
- [35:36]
B
Great. This was fun.
- [35:43]
A
Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show@foreign affairs.com the Foreign affairs interview is produced by Kate Brannan, Julia Fleming dresser and Molly McEnany. Special thanks also to Grace Finlayson Caitlin Joseph, Nora Revenaugh, Asher Ross, Gabrielle Sierra and Marcus Zacharia. Our theme music was written and performed by Robin Hilton. Make sure you subscribe subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every other Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.