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January 5 - January 12, 2024
Violence is at the heart of the authoritarian bargain between the leader and followers who relinquish rights in exchange for economic gain and power.5
“One is not born a torturer,” remarked a former torturer. For one hundred years, the strongman has guided the societies he rules through a transformation of culture and morals that legitimates harming others.
exposing a strongman’s corruption has been an exceedingly dangerous enterprise.
In the tradition of the fascists, Trump uses his rallies to train his followers to see violence in a positive light.
Hate crimes have increased annually since Trump’s arrival on the political scene, starting with a 17 percent jump between 2016 and 2017.
Like past strongmen, Trump used propaganda, corruption, and the cult of male force to create a climate favorable to persecution.
The history of strongmen is also the history of their opponents’ efforts
to remove them from power.
Most resistance in strongman states is non-violent, though, and unarmed protest has been among the most effective.
Today’s resistance collectives include coders and encryption specialists who find workarounds for government censorship.
By creating nodes of empathy and anger, social media helps to overcome the cynicism and paralyzing fear that authoritarian states foster.
It also boosts the humanizing power of laughter born of caricature.
At its core, though, resistance remains anchored in physical presence: people reclaiming public space and making a different nation visible and audible.
Putin has answered the waves of protest with more censorship and repression.
Resistance in degraded democracies run by personalist leaders, like those of Berlusconi and Trump, carries less risk of imprisonment or death than in the states of Erdoğan and Putin. Yet the private vendettas carried out by these heads of state can result in professional hardship and are often accompanied by the threat or actuality of physical harm.
Sustained mass protest requires opportunity, organization, and motivation born of outrage and the transcendence of fear.
power of positive emotions in politics. “We had two simple rules: ignore Erdoğan and love those who love Erdoğan,”
It’s not surprising that most authoritarians leave office involuntarily. They are supremely ill equipped to handle the downward arc of leadership and life. They have trouble abandoning personal traits like hubris, aggression, and greed that served them to stay in power, even when these become self-defeating.
Like all strongmen, the Führer lacked empathy.
The drive to accumulate and control bodies, territory, and wealth is a hallmark of strongman rule.
Of course, having it all is never enough for men who live in a secret state of dread at losing everything. Even as the strongman proclaims his infallibility, he is pursued by the demon of fear.
Fear is why such rulers use blackmail and clientelism to tie people to them, why they throw on a cloak of masculine invincibility, and why they seek out other strongmen as partners who will legitimate their authoritarian worldview.
TO OPPOSE AUTHORITARIANS EFFECTIVELY, we must have a clear-eyed view of how they manage to get into power and stay there.
That male model of authoritarian power, built on virile display and “man to man” diplomacy, may give way in the future as female-led authoritarian states emerge. Women are prominent within the European far right, starting with Marine Le Pen, head of France’s National Rally party. Trump markets his daughter Ivanka as a future leader, repeatedly inserting her into head-of-state group photos, as at the 2019 meeting of the Group of Twenty organization. Yet a female-led rightist state would pose no threat to authoritarianism’s appeal as a legitimating force of corruption, misogyny, and, in many
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The strongman’s rogue nature also draws people to him. He proclaims law-and-order rule, yet enables lawlessness. This paradox becomes official policy as government evolves into a criminal enterprise, Hitler’s Germany being one example and Putin’s Russia another.
The special psychological climate that strongmen create among their people—the thrill of transgression mixed with the comfort of submitting to his power—endows life with energy, purpose, and drama.
Likewise, many Americans dismissed the notion that Trump’s racism and his obsession with celebrity and profit above all else might help him win the election because they reflect enduring traits of American society.
The familiarity of these personages, marketed by their personality cults and populist ideologies as “one of us,” is also why many people don’t see them as dangerous early on.
Although we often hear that strongmen are genius strategists, few, if any, of them had a master plan for their rule. Their real talents are those of the street fighter and the con man rather than the chess master: quickness at making the most of the opportunities offered to them, skill at getting people to bond with them and believe their fictions, and a willingness to do anything necessary to get the absolute authority they crave. Most of them ended up with more power than they ever imagined.
TO COUNTER AUTHORITARIANISM, we must prioritize accountability and transparency in government.
Accountability also matters as a measure of open societies because the old yardstick—elections—is less reliable.
Anti-corruption efforts should encompass education about the merits of transparency and accountability to encourage workplace and governmental cultures that deter people from engaging in corruption in the first place.
Prosecution can be unpopular and play into the victimhood cult of leaders and their allies. Prevention is far better. We can encourage elites to form alliances with anti-corruption forces, as Transparency International does around the world. We can also support civic and nonprofit organizations that work for community justice and accountability at both the local and national levels.
They can dig their trenches deeper, or they can reach across the lines to stop a new cycle of destruction, knowing that solidarity, love, and dialogue are what the strongman most fears.
