Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

OURS IS THE AGE OF THE STRONGMAN, of heads of state like Berlusconi and Putin who damage or destroy democracy and use masculinity as a tool of political legitimacy.

How to combat this authoritarian ascendance is one of the most pressing matters of our time.5

All crises are leadership tests that clarify the core values, character, and governing style of rulers and their allies.

In each case, the leader’s priority was not to save lives, but to maintain or expand his power.

While some of these women may have had certain strongman traits (Thatcher’s nickname was “The Iron Lady”) or engaged in repressive actions against minority populations, none of them sought to destroy democracy, and so they are not addressed here.

For authoritarians, only some people are “the people,” regardless of their birthplace or citizenship status, and only the leader, above and beyond any institution, embodies that group.

Strongmen argues that today’s leaders also have deeper roots. They recycle rhetoric and actions that go back to the dawn of authoritarianism in the 1920s and are invested in rehabilitating their autocratic predecessors.

Personalist rulers can be long-lasting rulers, because they control patronage networks that bind people to them in relationships of complicity and fear.

Strongmen adds to discussions of authoritarianism by highlighting the importance of virility and how it works together with other tools of rule.

Virility enables his corruption, projecting the idea that he is above laws that weaker individuals must follow.

FOR ONE HUNDRED YEARS, charismatic leaders have found favor at moments of uncertainty and transition.

Often coming from outside the political system, they create new movements, forge new alliances, and communicate with their followers in original ways. Authoritarians hold appeal when society is polarized, or divided into two opposing ideological camps, which is why they do all they can to exacerbate strife.

Periods of progress in gender, labor, or racial emancipation have also been fertile terrain for openly racist and sexist aspirants to office, who soothe fears of the loss of male domination and class p...

As he gains a following, the aspiring leader tests out tools like propaganda and corruption that will later help him rule. The decay of truth and democratic dissolution proceed hand in hand, starting with the insurgent’s assertion that the establishment media delivers false or biased information while he speaks the truth and risks everything to get the “real facts” out. Once his supporters bond to his person, they stop caring about his falsehoods. They believe him because they believe in him.19

Putin continues the lineage of personalist rule in translating his private preoccupations with “loss of status, resentment, desire for respect, and vulnerability” into state policy.24

On one issue, the strongman has been consistent: his drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain.

Most strongmen have uncommon powers of persuasion.

His aura of specialness can dissipate if public opinion changes, leaving him without any legitimacy, unlike in dynastic and other forms of authority. That is why authoritarian states invest in leader cults and why they increase their use of censorship and repression if the leader’s hold on his people starts to disintegrate.29 Elites are the authoritarian’s most important promoters and collaborators.

Afraid of losing their class, gender, or race privileges, influential individuals bring the insurgent into the political system, thinking that he can be controlled as he solves their problems (which often involves persecuting the left).30

Once the ruler is in power, elites strike an “authoritarian bargain” that promises them power and security in return for loyalty to the ruler and...

The fastest way to lose your life to a strongman is to publicly denounce his corruption.

Runaway inflation and Germany’s default on reparations payments, which led the French and the Belgians to occupy the Ruhr area in 1923, increased the sense among some Germans that extraordinary action was needed to save the country.26

As in Italy, the action of a few conservative elites, rather than popular acclaim, got the strongman into power.

Military coups may be less common today, but they have been the most common path to authoritarian rule, accounting for 75 percent of democratic failures globally since World War II.

Justifications for coups repeat over a century, such as preventing economic disaster, avoiding leftist apocalypse, or removing corrupt leaders. Many strongmen who come to power by coup leave it in the same fashion. Two-thirds of dictators were removed by coups between 1950 and 2000.

Elections had long been a mark of an open society and their absence a criterion of autocracy, but new authoritarians use elections to keep themselves in office, deploying antidemocratic tactics like fraud or voter suppression to get the results they need.

Leaders who come to power by elections rather than coups are more likely to avoid ejection from office and less likely to face punishment.

That’s why such men employ armies of legal, propaganda, and security operatives to spin or suppress harmful information that may emerge. Once in power, they create an inner circle of family and loyalists from their youth and their professional worlds. Many of these individuals have one degree or less of proximity to criminals. So does the strongman, but he has far less chance of prosecution than his associates, who almost always take the fall for him. From Mussolini onward, making sure you have immunity while those who have done your dirty work go to jail has been an essential strongman skill.

In the East, hypernationalist and tribalist sentiments and ethnic conflicts, long managed by the Soviet system, proliferated.

Berlusconi’s election campaign marked the first time a political party was created and launched by a corporation.

power. Possessing neither Vladimir Lenin’s sparkling intellect nor Stalin’s gravitas, Putin was an improbable political idol in a country that, with Fascist Italy, had pioneered authoritarian leader worship.

Yeltsin’s government undertook economic reforms and neoliberal austerity measures that removed the Soviet-era social safety net and brought extreme economic hardship.

Millions of Russians, men aged twenty-five to thirty-five in particular, died in the early 1990s from alcohol-related diseases, heart attacks, suicides, and homicides.

The behaviors of elites who plundered the economy also expressed the collapse of values. Privatizations brought struggles among oligarchs for control of assets, and KGB officials smuggled vast sums of state gold and money out of Russia to offshore accounts. The combination of staggering wealth created at the top and mass misery soured some on the idea of ...

Strongmen don’t differentiate between personal and national interests, and for Putin a strong state was also a means of self-protection.

“THAT’S SOME WEIRD SHIT,” former president George W. Bush said of the inaugural address Trump delivered on January 20, 2017.

Yet the crisis rhetoric and positioning of the male leader as savior also followed a formula used by every strongman from Mussolini onward.

As had authoritarians before him, Trump saw himself as a maverick who could dispense with laws that less powerful individuals had to follow.

Like Berlusconi, Trump applied to politics the lessons of business practices that skirted the line between legality and illegality. By the time he ran for president, his entanglements with the Russian Mafia had been documented for years.27

For a century, strongmen have believed that society must be disrupted to allow a new order to take hold.

Bannon had long wanted to “give the system a shock” to jump-start a right-wing populist insurgency. Now he had the power to test his theory. He asked White House senior adviser Stephen Miller to draft a list of 200 executive orders to be implemented over the first one hundred days of the Trump administration— a blitzkrieg designed to create disorientation and fear.

The idea of the strongman who brings his nation to greatness is a foundation of authoritarian history.

Rituals like the “Heil Hitler” salute are central to the effort of collective transformation. They help the leader to train the bodies and minds of his people.

Yet, as in Herr S.’s dream, its real aim was to sap everyone’s dignity and damage the bonds of civil society—a crucial goal of every authoritarian regime.3

Strongman national projects generally leverage three time frames and states of mind: utopia, nostalgia, and crisis.

Nostalgia for better times is also part of the equation, since the ruler’s vow is to make the country great again.

This involves the fantasy of returning to an age when male authority was secure and women, people of color, and workers knew their places.

A third temporal frame, that of crisis, is the most particular to authoritarian rule.

“Why does xenophobia have to have a negative meaning?” Berlusconi asked in 2002, as he portrayed migrants and non-White populations as threats to Italy’s stability.

Yet the state has done nothing to curb the sex trafficking that has caused the disappearance of millions of women, a