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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.
many strongmen past and present have used populist rhetoric that defines their nations as bound by faith, race, and ethnicity rather than legal rights.
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 privilege and the end of White Christian “civilization.” Cultural conservatives have repeatedly gravitated to antidemocratic politics at such junctures of history, enabling dangerous individuals to enter mainstream politics and gain control of government.
Hitler resembled many later leaders in being an indecisive and insecure ruler behind his all-powerful Führer facade,
On one issue, the strongman has been consistent: his drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain.
Authoritarian history is full of projects and causes championed by the ruler out of hubris and megalomania and implemented to disastrous effect.
Strongmen examines why people collaborate with these leaders, sometimes for decades, no matter the cost to them or the country. It also reflects on a truth that the autocrat goes to lengths to conceal: he is no one without his followers. They are not merely the faces that cheer him at rallies, his corrupt coconspirators, and the persecutors of his enemies, but the force that anoints him as the chosen one and maintains him in power.
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 toleration of his suspension of rights. Some are true believers, and others fear the consequences of subtracting their support, but those
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Both the National Fascist Party (PNF), founded in 1921 by Mussolini, and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), which Hitler led as of 1921, electrified followers with the idea that revolution could be used to suppress rather than enable the sweeping political and social emancipation wrought by the war.
The cults that rose up around Mussolini and Hitler in the early 1920s answered anxieties about the decline of male status, the waning of traditional religious authority, and the loss of moral clarity.
Out of the crucible of these years came the cults of victimhood that turned emotions like resentment and humiliation into positive elements of party platforms.
Mussolini prepared the script used by today’s authoritarians that casts the leader as a victim of his domestic enemies and of an international system that has cheated his country.9
Mussolini’s partnership with conservatives provided a template for later authoritarians.
Italian Parliament passed a Fascist-sponsored electoral reform that gave any party receiving over 25 percent of the vote two-thirds of seats.
Hitler’s audiences multiplied as he exerted what observers saw as “an almost mystical power of attraction” at rallies, unleashing frenzies of raw emotion that expressed Germany’s pain and anxiety.
As in Italy, the action of a few conservative elites, rather than popular acclaim, got the strongman into power.
Hindenburg made Hitler chancellor, allowing him to rule by decree, as had his immediate predecessors, rather than by parliamentary majority.
German conservatives thought Hitler would be their tool.
World War I had created the conditions for the age of fascist takeovers, and World War II prepared the age of military coups.
Political polarization and fear of the left prevented Chilean elites and moderates from acting against the junta after Pinochet’s coup.
The center-right coalition he created brought neo-Fascists into government for the first time in Europe since 1945,
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.
Immigrants proved convenient new targets from the start.
Some Europeans who sought new models for rightist politics also looked to America. There, a more radical form of conservatism had taken hold during the 1980s, thanks to the support given to anti–big government and pro–White Christian sentiments during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The 1994 “Contract with America,” coauthored by Republican politicians Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, promised trust-based politics and fiscal responsibility. It influenced Fini, who some called “the Italian Gingrich,” the French National Front Party’s 1995 “Contract for France with the French,” and Berlusconi’s 2001
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Berlusconi also feared a more personal removal of liberty, since he was one step ahead of prosecutors’ charges when he was elected in 1994.
Becoming prime minister might save Italians from Communist tyranny, but it would also save Berlusconi by giving him immunity from prosecution.
When he entered into politics in 1994, no one since Mussolini had possessed such power to shape public opinion.
While campaign promises like creating 1 million jobs captured the news, Berlusconi, like strongmen before him, played on anxieties about living through an era of loss and transition.
Not a few Italians were relieved they could finally express positive feelings for Mussolini. A Roman dry cleaner surprised a longtime client by saying that the dictator “did great things for Italy; he only harmed subversives and Jews.”
Berlusconi and his Forza Italia allies also sought to turn public opinion against the judiciary.
Just as Franco was a transition figure between the fascist and military coup eras, so did Berlusconi serve as a bridge to twenty-first century authoritarians who discredit democratic institutions for personal benefit while mainstreaming extremist political forces.
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
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Yet the crisis rhetoric and positioning of the male leader as savior also followed a formula used by every strongman from Mussolini onward. What Bush saw as strange in the context of American democracy was normal in the authoritarian tradition. So was the tactic of leaving your audience uneasy and uncertain of what you will do next. “The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action,” Trump intoned.26
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.
Trump had thought about running for president for years, but the stars aligned for the 2016 election cycle, when the uptick in global migration and the affront of eight years of Obama’s rule created the right degree of resentment against people of color.
As in Germany, Italy, and Chile during the final years of democracy, polarization in American politics had also reached a new high, creating a ready market for Trump’s divisive rhetoric. A 2012 asssessment of the GOP by the political scientists Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann captures key elements of an authoritarian turn that primed Republicans to accept Trump’s candidacy:
“I hate to say it, I’m becoming mainstream,” said Trump as he stood with Sessions at a February 2016 event. By then, though, the GOP had become an extremist party in terms of its platforms. It was closer to far-right European parties like Alternative for Germany than to mainstream German Christian Democrats or British Tories. Trump’s right-wing populist views were a good fit.
its real aim was to sap everyone’s dignity and damage
the bonds of civil society—a crucial goal of every authoritarian regime.3
THE STRONGMAN’S PROJECT OF national greatness is the glue of his government. It justifies his claims of absolute power and his narratives of risking everything to save the nation from domestic crisis and humiliation by foreigners.
The divine blessing bestowed upon the ruler’s actions is a consistent theme of personality cults.
Strongmen probe the sore spots of the nation, stimulating feelings of humiliation and anxiety and offering their own leadership as a salve.
Destroying the left meant that Chile would be “purified of the vices and bad habits that ended up destroying our institutions.” Two months later, US Assistant Secretary of State Jack Kubisch noted the “puritanical, crusading spirit—a determination to cleanse and rejuvenate” in Chile.
Far from being self-defense, violence was a means of forcing a “profound change in the mentality of the country,” as one government official put it. The junta’s operación limpieza (“operation cleanup”), which sought to cancel Allende’s legacy and remove the signs of leftist culture from the public sphere, showed the junta’s messianic spirit.
The demographic policies of new authoritarians in Europe and America, like those of the fascists, reflect concerns of being “outperformed” demographically by non-Whites and non-Christians.
This proved a winning message, not just with the conservatives who voted for him in 1994, but also with “the forgotten”: previously apolitical voters who distrusted career politicians but bonded with Berlusconi.
“I am the most democratic man ever to be Prime Minister of Italy,” Berlusconi asserted as he bent the institutions of Italian democracy to his private needs. When he returned to office in 2001, he had ten trials underway, on charges of accounting fraud, bribery, and more. Over two terms in office (2001–2006, 2008–2011) he had dozens of ad personam laws passed to protect himself from prosecution. His claim that he was “the Jesus Christ of Italian politics” referred to his role as savior of the nation and his martyrdom by the leftist press and judiciary. Senate president Renato Schifani accused
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“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. The Bossi-Fini law his government passed that year allowed for automatic deportation of migrants traveling on boats found in international waters, forced migrants who arrived in Italy into detention centers for up to two months, and made asylum contingent on long-term work and housing contracts. Illegal immigrants became Berlusconi’s main targets
Berlusconi was often called the Mussolini of the twenty-first century. Like Il Duce, he made his image dominant in the public sphere, and he reoriented Italian foreign policy around his personal relationships with the despots he so admired. Taking advantage of his control of national media, Berlusconi remade Italian political culture. He mainstreamed the far right, merging AN and Forza Italia into a new People of Freedom party, which governed Italy from 2009 to 2011. He detained and demonized migrants, promoted the agendas of autocrats like Putin, and exercised authoritarian and personalist
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