Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and “Strong Man Mania”

The new love affair between Russian President Vlad Putin and GOP insurgent presidential candidate Donald Trump of course is raising eyebrows.

Putin told ABC News about Trump: “He’s a very colorful person. Talented, without any doubt, . . . absolutely the leader in the American presidential race” who wants to “move to a more solid, deeper level of relations” between Russia and the United States.

Trump gushingly responded on MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “Sure, when people call you ‘brilliant’ it’s always good. Especially when the person heads up Russia.” When reminded that Putin has journalists who disagree with him killed, Trump answered: “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader. Unlike what we have in this country.” Trump noted that “there is a lot of killing going on in the world,” before offering as an afterthought that he “absolutely” opposed killing journalists.

Viewed in historical perspective, the Trump-Putin bromance should not surprise.

American and other western elites between the world wars were shot through with an admiration for totalitarian dictators and movements that, post-World War II, they did their best to forget. In the 1930s, Julien Benda focused especially on the French version of the phenomenon in The Treason of the Intellectuals, a broadside against apologists and admirers of the Fuhrer who rallied behind the slogan “better Hitler than Blum.” Leon Blum was the Jewish Socialist Premier of the French Republic in the 1930s. John Patrick Diggins’ Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (1975) was the first book to focus on the infatuation with Italian fascism (pre-Mussolini’s 1938 adoption of anti-Semitism) of a surprisingly wide swathe of American as well as British intellectuals. Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism (2009) offered a more ideological take on the same theme.

Historian Charles Beard, poets Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound (a Mussolini fanatic), journalist Lincoln Steffens, FDR advisor Rexford Tugwell, and even Will Rogers pronounced glowingly about the Duce. Across the Pond, H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw chimed in.

Some of this intellectual support elided into favorable or forgiving attitudes toward Hitler. This was true of Charles Beard as well as his fellow historian and Isolationist Harry Elmer Barnes, now largely forgotten but then influential, as well as”radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin. George Bernard Shaw was an equal opportunity admirer of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler. Regarding a possible Nazi invasion of England, Shaw said his response to the invaders would be to: “Welcome them as tourists.”

Today, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan still has a soft spot for Hitler, as does right wing bully boy Pat Buchanan. Embarrasingly, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and Castro, and even Arafat and Qadaffi have enjoyed cult followings.

Before World War II, support for Hitler was much less prevalent among American intellectuals than support for Mussolini—or, for that matter, for Stalin. A few Hollywood Communists, including Dalton Trumbo, liked “Uncle Joe.” The Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Walter Duranty covered up his responsibility for the man-made Ukrainian famine. Lincoln Steffens, also a fan of Mussolini, wrote after visiting Stalin’s USSR in the 1920s: “I’ve seen the future and it works.” (Later it was disdainfully said about America: “I’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work.”)

Alas, there were the true believing Soviet agents, like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, who infiltrated the Roosevelt and Truman administrations or were involved in atomic espionage.

Virtually all those mentioned so far were intellectuals or would-be intellectuals whose motivations usually melded some form of political idealism with an identification with ruthless power.

The other side of the coin were “men of action”—mostly but not exclusively big businessmen. Historians on the left like to play up the role of major American corporations, including Ford, GM, and IBM, that were in bed with the Nazis in the 1930s. True enough, but their motive was greed, rarely ideology. However, in the case of Henry Ford the infatuation with the Fuhrer went much deeper. Ford was a businessman who considered history “bunk,” yet had some intellectual pretensions. For example, we was a good friend of scientist Thomas Edison as well as a fellow traveler of European anti-Semites who helped convince him to Americanize The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

On the other hand, American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, who was feted in Hitler’s Germany numerous times and considered Nazism “the wave of the future” (his novelist wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh was even more enthusiastic), was a true intellectual “man of action” with, among other things, a very strong interest in eugenics. It really is no surprise that the Isolationist views that led him to join the pre-World War II America First Committee quickly spilled over into anti-Semitic attacks on Jews allegedly trying to lead America into another world war.

Clearly, Donald Trump is in the big businessman, self-styled “man of action” mold. His supporters seem to be caught up in the same “strong man” cult of personality that attracted cheerleaders and followers for prior totalitarian leaders.

A bully and buffoon, perhaps, but history teaches us these can be dangerous in positions of power.