Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Krassnoff showed S. how “states of exception can be normalized in people,” creating individuals who see the violence they inflict as righteous and purifying.

Just as Pinochet saw Operation Condor as a transnational effort to save civilization by exterminating the left, so did Gaddafi view terrorism as a means of creating an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist world.

Each ruler finds his own formula, gauging the tolerance of elites and the public for violence.

Two weeks into his presidency and days after Kara-Murza’s second poisoning, Trump expressed his respect for Putin on Fox News.

In the tradition of the fascists, Trump uses his rallies to train his followers to see violence in a positive light. His speech in Las Vegas modeled an America where the press is penned up and anyone who criticizes the leader deserves a beating. Hate crimes have increased annually since Trump’s arrival on the political scene, starting with a 17 percent jump between 2016 and 2017. A study by political scientists showed a 226 percent increase in hate crimes in counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016.63

His policies of mass incarceration have been in line with American traditions—the United States is the world’s biggest jailer—and have drawn on practices inherited from previous administrations.

At sixty-four rallies held between February 2017 and August 2019, he mentioned immigrants more than 500 times, labeling them as criminals (189 mentions), killers (32), and predators (31). A blitz of 2,199 Facebook ads appeared between January and August 2019 warning of the consequences of an immigrant “invasion.” This message apparently resonated with White nationalist Patrick Crusius, whose Facebook page featured Trump anti-immigrant slogans. On August 2, 2019, Crusius opened fire on a Latino-frequented El Paso Walmart, murdering twenty-one people and injuring dozens. “This is a response to the Hispanic invasion,” his manifesto stated.

He has tried to remove immigrant children from schools, repeating fascist treatment of Jews.

Yet the scale of these forced separations—almost 70,000 in 2019—brings Trump’s practices in line with states like Hitler’s Germany

The ICE agents that round up migrants increasingly appear in neighborhoods in SWAT team formations, in full tactical gear. CBP agents, who operate within a 100-mile radius of the border, also see themselves as soldiers, and some refer to migrants as their “prisoners of war.” Many treat their facilities as spaces of exception from professional and ethical norms. While drug smuggling among CBP agents was not uncommon during the Bush and Obama administrations, the demonization of migrants by Trump and his government has encouraged new levels of cruelty, such as the denial of visas to victims of sex trafficking. “Border Patrol is designed and made for someone like Donald Trump,” says Jenn Budd, a former CBP officer who watched her peers embrace extremist ideas that since 2016 have received White House benediction. In America, too, many people have lain awake at night, fearing that state agents will bang on the door.

Most resistance in strongman states is non-violent, though, and unarmed protest has been among the most effective.

being laughed at is something strongmen dread.

Strongmen use the public sphere to display their power to regiment bodies and minds. Resistance activities reclaim that space from the state and speak back to the government’s violence, corruption, and exploitation. Such protests can be joyful collective occasions, as in the anti-Putin rallies in the winter of 2011–2012.

The march originated in Facebook pages created by individuals across America after Trump’s election. They asked people to demonstrate in defense of reproductive and other rights that the Trump administration would likely imperil. Over 400 organizations eventually partnered with the march, and its symbol—handcrafted pink pussy hats—turned Trump’s misogyny and history of sexual assault against him. With 400,000 to 500,000 people joining in Washington, DC, and 3 to 5 million participating in over 400 marches across the country, it was the largest mobilization in American history.60 It also changed the face of American politics. Many of the 3,000 women on the ballot in the fall 2018 midterm elections had been inspired by the Women’s March to enter politics. Over ninety women were voted into office, including a record number of women of color.

Moreover, many police officers came to the protests imbued with far-right ideologies. In 2015, an FBI counterterrorism report found “active links” between law enforcement and White supremacist and other antidemocratic groups. By 2019, studies of posts by former and retired police officers active in Facebook groups found that 1 in 5 current officers and 2 in 5 retired ones have made racist and dehumanizing comments about Blacks, Muslims, and other groups targeted by the Trump administration.

Barr formed a Task Force on Anti-Government Extremists. Echoing right-wing propaganda from Pinochet to Putin, Barr claimed that the protests had been “hijacked by violent radical elements” and were “fortified by foreign entities seeking to sow chaos and disorder in our society.” The over 400 incidents of police physically assaulting or arresting journalists who covered the protests suggests that Trump’s anti-press propaganda had been effective.

In 1957, Mussolini was brought home to his birthplace, Predappio, for reburial. There to meet him was his wife Rachele, who had outlasted all of his lovers and knew him better than anyone in the world, which is probably why she never prayed at the temple of his greatness. “My husband appeared to be a lion, but instead he was a rather sad and small man,” she told a journalist in 1946.20

This threatening atmosphere made the opposition’s success at mobilizing civil society all the more remarkable. Crucially, anti-Pinochet parties put aside their differences, and over a dozen of them united in one coalition, the Concertación.

His disclosures of his plastic surgeries, like the “California lifting” he had at a Swiss clinic, increased his emotional appeal for both men and women. His boasts about his virility angered critics who saw his machismo as part of his authoritarian governing style, but delighted his admirers. “He lost his wife but not his votes,” said commentator Beppe Severgnini in 2009 of the consequences of his compulsion to have young female bodies at his disposal.

In fact, his personality cult left Forza Italia no space to develop a political identity independent of him, and no respite from his endless judicial woes, scandals, and loyalty tests.

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.

In fact, strongmen do not vanish with their exits from power, but instead remain as traces within the body of their people. The muscle memory to salute and sing the songs can be hard to shake.

Strongman states, helped by their foreign backers, obscure the profound chaos and destruction they cause. Instead, they perpetuate the notion that authoritarianism bests democracy in terms of efficiency and economic growth.6 Certainly, some categories of people prosper under authoritarian rule. Leaders help their cronies and financial elites concentrate capital and privatize public goods. Yet business in general is often devastated by such predation. Fascist states went after the assets of Jews and other enemies; anti-colonial military regimes expelled foreigners (Mobutu, Gaddafi, and Amin had to invite some of them back to save their economies); and new authoritarians like Putin and Erdoğan take over profitable businesses, some built up over decades. By exacerbating economic inequality, plundering state assets, favoring ideology over expertise, and killing, imprisoning, and forcing into exile large numbers of talented people, strongmen impoverish the societies they rule.

The autocrat bolsters patriarchal authority when it is seen as under threat, as in Italy in the 1920s, Germany and Spain in the 1930s, Russia and Italy in the 1990s, and America in 2016.

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.

Understanding how strongmen triumph and stay in power for so long also means abandoning some cherished notions about national identity—

The strongman’s trick is to seem exceptional and yet to embody the national everyman, with all of his endearing flaws.

Berlusconi made Italians feel good about breaking the rules, as Trump would do for Americans. Turkish admirers describe Erdoğan as a member of their extended family.

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.

Like all dictators, Hitler loves only those whom he can despise.

TO COUNTER AUTHORITARIANISM, we must prioritize accountability and transparency in government. At the heart of strongman rule is the claim that he and his agents are above the law, above judgment, and not beholden to the truth. Accountability also matters as a measure of open societies because the old yardstick—elections—is less reliable. New authoritarian states often simulate democracy, and nominal democracies governed by personalist rulers often act like autocracies. In Trump’s America, as in Berlusconi’s Italy, the legal and the illegal, fact and fiction, celebrity and politics blend together until nothing means anything anymore and everything is “a confidence game.” The corrosive effects of the shift away from standards of accountability and truth were evident in the reaction of CBS News journalist Norah O’Donnell to Trump’s January 2020 State of the Union speech. Although the speech contained multiple false statements about economic growth during his presidency, O’Donnell hailed it as a triumph by “the reality TV president . . . a master showman at his best.”

Prosecution can be unpopular and play into the victimhood cult of leaders and their allies. Prevention is far better.

Pressure campaigns on banks, law firms, and other enablers of authoritarian corruption can fuel a reconsideration of the practice of working for autocrats for the revenue it brings. The media, always so quick to cover every utterance and action of the strongman, must also tell the stories of those who courageously denounce corruption, from Giacomo Matteotti to Boris Nemtsov to those risking their lives today. We should also hear more about efforts to incentivize anti-corruption behaviors.

Ketchum represented Putin from 2006 to 2014 and lobbied successfully for him to be TIME’s 2007 Man of the Year.

As in the past, the novelty of the strongman’s approach to politics threw even seasoned observers off course. President George W. Bush had no frame of reference for Trump’s 2017 inaugural address and described it as “weird shit,” although it was perfectly normal in the context of authoritarian history. Like Italians and Germans in the 1920s and 1930s and some Chileans after the 1973 coup, many Americans believed that the man espousing lies and extremist politics would calm down and abide by democratic norms and institutions once he took power.

The thousands who heeded his call and gathered, unmasked, at indoor rallies in Tulsa, Phoenix, and other cities in June became fodder for his propaganda machine, letting him pose as a virile leader untouchable even by disease. By then, America had had the world’s highest infection rate for several months running.

Such comparisons, however, also bring to mind another lesson of history: never to underestimate the strongman’s tenacity and his will to do whatever it takes to stay in power. Current and former CIA analysts and officers, trained to spot signs of democratic disintegration, cautioned that polarization and use of force against protesters have often heralded an authoritarian crackdown. “This is what happens in countries before a collapse,” said former analyst Gail Helt. “I know this playbook,” warned former CIA undercover officer Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) of the escalating tensions in America. Emergency actions hold special appeal for a leader whose competency and popularity ratings are in decline.

Opening the heart to others and viewing them with compassion has time and again led to effective electoral pushback against strongman rule. The Chilean opposition’s “joy is on the way” 1988 campaign that drove Pinochet out of office and the “radical love” platform that lifted Ekram Imamoğlu to victory in 2019 as Istanbul’s mayor both mobilized sentiments of optimism, solidarity, and community.

Such individuals may feel ashamed and unwilling to admit their errors of judgment unless they are approached with the right spirit of openness, at the right time.

There are two paths people can take when faced with the proliferation of polarization and hatred in their societies. 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. History shows the importance of keeping hope and faith in humanity and of supporting those who struggle for freedom in our own time. We can carry with us the stories of those who lived and died over a century of democracy’s destruction and resurrection. They are precious counsel for us today.