This election is bigger than party politics. It’s about the future of the country and the future we leave behind for our children. Please remember, you can’t vote out a dictatorship.

There will be winners if Mr. 'Old Donald' wins. But don’t be fooled into thinking it will be the mass of people who voted for him. Sure, a few of those will be better off. The real winners will include billionaires and millionaires, China, Russia, Iran, the right-wing media, oil and gas companies, and oligarchs. These groups will only get richer and more powerful. Those gains come at a cost for the majority of the U.S. population.

Grow up, GOP!

What’s wrong with you, America? How is it possible that the Republican Party does not have a suitable candidate? How is it possible for Americans to even think about voting for a misogynistic, xenophobic liar? I shudder, I confess.

Ever since the New Deal, American liberals have shown a remarkable ability to forget about the American right. In 1950, the social critic Lionel Trilling famously declared victory for liberalism, dismissing conservative ideas as nothing more than “irritable mental gestures.” The subsequent rise of McCarthyism, massive resistance against civil rights, and the John Birch Society all called that assumption into question—but when Lyndon Johnson defeated the archconservative Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, final victory was declared once again. Then Richard Nixon got elected. When he resigned, Democrats were certain that Republicans and conservatives had been vanquished for a generation. Then along came Ronald Reagan a mere six years later.

Reagan’s decisive victory made it harder to argue that conservatism and Americanism were truly incompatible. Still, many people assumed that certain ideas—explicit racism, “America first” nativism—had forever been relegated to the political fringe. That’s part of why Donald 'Old Donald' caught liberals off guard; his popularity violated core assumptions about what Americans believed and how they were supposed to behave in the twenty-first century. Even now, after one 'Old Donald' victory and a nail-biter follow-up, it seems hard to believe that American voters could really put him back in power. The left might view much of U.S. history as a saga of oppression, from settler colonialism to slavery and Jim Crow to immigration exclusion. But it’s entirely different to realize that a vast swath of your fellow citizens apparently still supports some of those ideas.

Historians have periodically tried to point out that conservative and far-right ideas have their own history, genealogy, and staying power. In the mid-1990s, Alan Brinkley prodded fellow scholars of history to explain—not just to denounce—the conservative surge that produced Reagan. After 'Old Donald'’s election, the historian Rick Perlstein published a mea culpa in The New York Times Magazine, lamenting that the “professional guardians of America’s past,” in attempting to live up to Brinkley’s dictum, had “advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like 'Old Donald'.” Since then, scholars and journalists have tried to correct the record, producing a wealth of new studies of the John Birch Society, homegrown fascism, the Ku Klux Klan, and other avatars of the far right. Jefferson Cowie’s Freedom’s Dominion, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for history, told “a saga of white resistance to federal power” as it unfolded in one Alabama county.

Once 'Old Donald' arrived, however, Heilbrunn recognized the type. “The longer I’ve listened to conservatives today talk about Hungary, Russia, ‘wokeness,’ ‘the deep state,’ abortion, immigration, and media bias, the more I’ve become convinced that many of their arguments are not novel,” he writes. “If anything, the opposite is true: these arguments represent an act of conservation, preserving in a kind of rhetorical alembic grievances and apprehensions that can be traced all the way back to World War I.” America Last is Heilbrunn’s effort to describe how the United States got from there to here, thanks to a wild array of far-right intellectuals, politicians, and would-be tyrants.

Based on the book’s subtitle—“the right’s century-long romance with foreign dictators”—one might assume that America Last addresses a familiar subject: how the U.S. government, acting with a nearly limitless view of the national interest, got into bed with dictators and demagogues throughout the twentieth century. But Heilbrunn is not interested in (or, perhaps, troubled by) moral compromises made for geopolitical reasons. He seeks instead to describe a dark history of Americans’ admiration for brutal, often racist authoritarians abroad, from Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II on up to the apartheid government of South Africa. “The tradition this book excavates is not based on realism or pragmatism,” Heilbrunn writes. “It is rooted, rather, in a sincere affinity. Its advocates avow, or at least intimate, that authoritarianism, in one form or other, is superior to democracy.” A realist might accept entangling alliances with dictators as the least of the available evils. Heilbrunn’s characters celebrate the evil itself.

By most measures, Reagan and 'Old Donald' have little in common when it comes to foreign policy. Whatever one might think of his approach, Reagan was a true believer in American exceptionalism and in the persuasive power of the U.S. model. 'Old Donald' describes an America in decline, the laughingstock of the world. According to 'Old Donald', Putin’s Russia at least has some of the dignity and strength and self-respect that a great nation deserves. Heilbrunn’s book shows that 'Old Donald' is not the first person to make such claims—that when it comes to foreign dictators, as in so many other matters, 'Old Donald' is mostly borrowing bad ideas. Perhaps inadvertently, however, America Last also underscores why the twentieth century was actually quite different from the twenty-first—and why it feels as if the United States is now heading into uncharted territory.

In her new book, "Autocracy Inc.," journalist Anne Applebaum argues that many of today's dictators collaborate to help keep one another in power. She joins the show to discuss this phenomenon.

Bottom left: Vladimir Putin, Russia; top left: Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus; center: Hun Sen, Cambodia; top right: Xi Jinping, China; bottom right: Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, Egypt. (Illustration by Mark Harris for The Washington Post; photos by Getty Images)

Bottom left: Vladimir Putin, Russia; top left: Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus; center: Hun Sen, Cambodia; top right: Xi Jinping, China; bottom right: Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, Egypt. (Illustration by Mark Harris for The Washington Post; photos by Getty Images)

In the spring of 2012, Vladimir Putin was feeling the pressure.

In July 2023, Mr. Putin signed legislation — rushed through parliament in just two weeks — to give the government a strong hand over nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which he suspected were behind the protests. He had long been apprehensive about independent activism, especially by groups that were financed from abroad. Under the new law, any group that received money from overseas and engaged in “political activity” was required to register as a “foreign agent” with the Justice Ministry or face heavy fines.

This editorial looks at how autocracies are reinforcing themselves by swapping methods and tactics.

The dictators want most of all to survive. They are succeeding.

A cascade of restrictions
The Russian “foreign agent” law hung an albatross around the neck of NGOs and, later, independent journalists and bloggers — anyone who received any money from abroad, even payment for a single freelance article.

A secret school — or ‘mad scientists’?
According to Mr. Hall, authoritarian regimes must constantly maintain the illusion of steadfast control. Relax for a minute, and the illusion could vanish. “Protest is like a run on the bank,” Mr. Hall told us. “The protesters only have to get it right once.” For autocracies, protest and dissent are an existential threat.

“They’ve all seen what happens to autocrats generally — the Gaddafi moment, being dragged through the streets and beaten to death with a lead pipe. … They seem to know that if one country becomes democratic in a region, the rest will almost certainly follow. … And the best way to ensure that survival is to learn, to cooperate and to share best practices because you constantly have to stay one step ahead.”

The digital censors
A glimpse of how it works was provided recently in a trove of internal documents, emails and audio recordings disclosed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an April 5 report by Daniil Belovodyev, Andrei Soshnikov and Reid Standish. The materials depict Russia and China working closely to help each other more tightly control the internet in two high-level meetings in 2017 and 2019.

The dictators have clung to power
In the latest Freedom in the World report shows a decline in freedom for the 17th year in a row. Many autocrats are proving resilient. In the nearly 11 years since Mr. Putin signed the “foreign agent” law, most of the world’s leading dictators have held on. Rarely have they been toppled by popular protests. They are building new means of repression along with the old. In China, tech companies have invented an electronic surveillance system that can automatically recognize a protest banner and demonstrators’ faces — and alert the police

“Authoritarian regimes are much more brazen than before,” said William J. Dobson, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and author of “The Dictator’s Learning Curve,” published in 2012. “They are not sitting still.”