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January 5 - January 12, 2024
From Mussolini’s use of newsreels to Trump’s use of Twitter, authoritarians have had direct communications channels with the public, allowing them to pose as authentic interpreters of the popular will.
the strongman has turned politics into an aesthetic experience, with him as the star.
Whatever the medium, a paradoxical truth holds: the more skilled the leader is at this mediatized politics, the more his admirers see him as
authentic and feel a personal connection with him.
Strongmen disappear people, and they also disappear knowledge that conflicts with their ideologies and goals.
Pinochet closed down philosophy departments, and Orbán banned gender studies. All twenty-first-century authoritarians suppress climate change science, lest that discourage the plunder of national resources that generates profits for them and their allies.13
Hitler’s voice, so laden with emotion that it stilled thought, was his chief propaganda weapon.
Janet Flannery, remarked on how his speeches built from relative calm to a state of “fanatic-hysterical energy.”
As he spoke, he became “like a man hypnotized, repeating himself into a frenzy.” Like all strongmen, Hitler h...
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Hitler responds to the vibrations of the human heart with the sensitivity of a seismograph … proclaiming the most secret desires, the least admissible instincts…. His words go like an arrow to their target, he touches every private wound in the raw, liberates the mass unconscious … telling it what it most wants to hear.27
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.32
When he struggled on the gallows, a young woman who
had been inciting the crowd from the stands ran up and pulled on his legs until he was still.
The expansion of RT is just one facet of the Kremlin’s focus on political warfare that favors informational, diplomatic, and economic measures over physical confrontation.
He evoked Il Duce with slogans like “thank goodness we have Silvio” (“thank goodness for Mussolini” was the earlier version), while presenting himself as emblematic of the average man.
Berlusconi also updated the strongman victimhood script for the twenty-first century. Posing as the target of liberal and left-wing press harassment, he had his media empire disgorge streams of stories that aimed to smear and intimidate members of the press and the judiciary.
twenty-first-century strongmen count on corporate conflict aversion to do their work for them.
Trump does not lie about one or two things. Rather, facts on any subject that conflict with his goals of power and profit are degraded through rumor and innuendo or simply altered or denied.
The number of documented falsehoods he uttered as president increased from 5.9 a day in 2017 to an average of 22 a day in 2019, for a total of 16,241 in his first three years in office. This constitutes a disinformation barrage without precedent in America.
Trump’s vilification of the media has partly backfired. American investigative journalism has been revitalized, and “enemy” media like the “failing” New York Times and the Washington Post report increased digital subscriptions.
Twitter has been for Trump what newsreels were for the fascists: a direct channel to the people that keeps him constantly in the news.
One thing was certain: once Mussolini entered your life and your vagina, you were never free of him again.2
THE STRONGMAN WOULD BE NOTHING without bodies to control.
Far from being a private affair, the sex life of the strongman reveals how corruption, propaganda, violence, and virility work together and how personalist rulers use state resources to fulfill their desires.
Presented by their personality cults as the ideal blend of everyman and superman, authoritarians make ordinary men feel better about their own transgressions.
These were probably not as lavishly bad as what the leader was engaging in: hosting sex parties with underage women in attendance (Berlusconi), being spanked by porn stars (Trump), or keeping the twin sister of your wife as your mistress (Mobutu). The appeal of these leaders for many rests on their having the power to get away with things that ordinary men cannot, whether in the bedroom or in politics.4
Gaining favor after periods of economic and political gain for women, the strongman seeks to reverse shifts in social norms that threaten patriarchy and ...
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For a century, women have been the strongman’s adversaries, along with prosecutors, journalists, and the political opposition. His machismo is not just empty posturing, but a strategy of political legitimation and an important component of authoritarian rule.
IF STRONGMEN ARE such misogynist monsters, why do some women love them?
Some appreciate the social welfare benefits they offer and feel elevated by inclusion in the national community. After all, those of the proper skin color, ethnicity, and religion have status above female and male enemies. Twenty-first-century leaders boost their popularity with female voters by appointing women to positions of authority.
The modern strongman can tolerate women in power as long as they work for him.12
Faced with women of equal authority, it’s a different story, as Angela Merkel knows. Berlusconi’s attempts to humiliate the German chancellor have included taking a long phone call in front of her
while she stood waiting and reportedly saying that she was an “unfuckable lardass.” Trump refused to shake her hand, and Putin made her wait for hours to see him and unleashed his dog near her to trigger her fear of canines. “I understand why he has to do this, to prove he’s a man,” said Merkel of this last episode. “He’s afraid of his own ...
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Authoritarian rule erodes trust and authenticity between people.
His step-niece Geli
Raubal was a near-prisoner during the two years she lived in a room in his Munich apartment before she killed herself with his gun at age twenty-three in 1931.
The prominence of female enablers in Gaddafi’s system offers another example of the strongman’s paradoxical view of gender emancipation. Women advance in their careers by making it easier for the leader and his inner circle to harm other women.34
Berlusconi’s female fans didn’t care about his misogyny. His popularity with women remained unaffected even when news of his sex procurement scandal first broke.
Berlusconi credited his friend Gaddafi with suggesting the euphemism “bunga-bunga” for his sex parties, which took place at his residences in Sardinia, Rome, or at Arcore, outside Milan.
As a man in his seventies, Trump borrows other men’s bodies to show his virility rather than display his own in the tradition of Mussolini and Putin.49
Reclaiming male authority after the Obama era also means creating an environment in which men can act on their desires with impunity.
One-party rule and mass killing are now less common, making twenty-first-century leaders more dependent on propaganda and censorship to cover up their thievery and incompetence.
It’s likely that Russian money is part of the estimated $300 billion laundered in the United States every year.42 —
“We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need from Russia,” declared Eric Trump in 2014.46
As in other countries, the rise of authoritarianism in America has meant the end of accountability and ethical standards in government.
Overall 100,000 civil servants left, retired, or were fired as Trump rid himself of experts and critics.
Ritual humiliation of male subordinates trains underlings to adopt a survivalist mentality, pitting them against each other.
In a 2019 New York Times op-ed, Comey described corruption as a process. It starts with the act of staying silent in a meeting while his lies “wash over you, unchallenged,” making you and others present into “co-conspirators.” It continues with requests for public tributes and escalates to attacks on institutions, including the one you serve. With each compromise, you hope he will be satisfied, but he returns to ask for more. What he wants—what all strongmen want—is to make you his: “You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values. And then you are lost. He has eaten
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Authoritarian states have always promoted individuals who are willing to experiment with repression as a way of reshaping the nation, like SS official Adolf Eichmann for fascist-era mass killing, DINA head Manuel Contreras for Cold War–era torture, and Erdoğan’s justice minister Abdulhamit Gül and Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller for new authoritarian mass detentions.
Amin made sure that the officers who oversaw his murders of over 300,000 people lived rent-free and received regular gifts of whisky and luxury goods
