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Today’s strongmen are well aware that every minute the public and the press spend on the outrage du jour is time they’re not mobilizing for political action or investigating abuses of power.
THE STRONGMAN WOULD BE NOTHING without bodies to control. He needs crowds to acclaim his projects of national greatness on camera, taxpayers to fund his follies and his private bank accounts, soldiers to fight his wars, and mothers to birth all of the above.
In 2019, the Department of Justice’s Office of Violence against Women changed the definition of domestic violence on its website, limiting it to physical acts of harm. The DOJ no longer considers “sexual, emotional, economic, or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person” as “felony or misdemeanor crimes.”
The dictator in Gabriel García Márquez’s 1975 novel Autumn of the Patriarch, who has the Caribbean Sea drained and sold to his US supporters, no longer seems so fantastical.
Elsewhere in Europe, Franco’s fellow fascists pursued policies of mass murder. Yugoslavia, which was partitioned by Italy and Germany in 1941, was decimated. In the Italian zone, twenty years of anti-Slavic propaganda and persecution culminated in executions and confinements that killed an estimated 250,000 people between 1941 and 1943.
Studies conducted by Pippa Norris and other political scientists rank the GOP among the most extremist parties in the West in terms of its rejection of liberal democratic values. Its positions on immigration, crusades against racial and gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights, and attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities have placed it close to the platforms of the parties of sitting autocrats like Erdoğan and Modi.
Of course, having it all is never enough for men who live in a secret state of dread at losing everything.
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. “Every country gets the gangster it deserves,” a former partisan’s comment about Italy under Mussolini, may seem harsh to some and true to others.9
