Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

OURS IS THE AGE OF THE STRONGMAN, of heads of state like Berlusconi and Putin who damage or destroy democracy and use masculinity as a tool of political legitimacy.

authoritarianism, defined as a political system in which executive power is asserted at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches of government.

many strongmen past and present have used populist rhetoric that defines their nations as bound by faith, race, and ethnicity rather than legal rights.

Loyalty to him and his allies, rather than expertise, is the primary qualification for serving in the state bureaucracy,

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.”

Once his supporters bond to his person, they stop caring about his falsehoods.

strongman has been consistent: his drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain.

strongmen have uncommon powers of persuasion.

Deutsche Bank has funded authoritarian states from Hitler’s Germany to Putin’s Russia, as well as lending to businesses like the Trump Organization that are suspected of helping autocrats and their cronies to launder their money.

attracting veterans who exchanged state-issued military uniforms for black and brown shirts. Bringing the mentality and tactics of the war home, these combatants regarded persecuting domestic enemies as a patriotic duty

Reversing female empowerment at a time of mass male injury and declining birth rates was one target of fascism;

The spread of atheistic Communism also seemed to threaten White Christian civilization, as did the perceived loss of imperial controls over peoples of color.

the strongman’s golden rule: do whatever is necessary to stay in power.

declaring himself and his party to be above the law.

Mussolini pardoned all political criminals in July 1925 and fired the magistrates overseeing the ongoing Matteotti investigation.

Leaders who come to power by elections rather than coups are more likely to avoid ejection from office and less likely to face punishment.

Once in power, they create an inner circle of family and loyalists from their youth and their professional worlds. 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.

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.

As had authoritarians before him, Trump saw himself as a maverick who could dispense with laws that less powerful individuals had to follow.

By the time he ran for president, his entanglements with the Russian Mafia had been documented for years.27

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.

Trump’s treatment of his Democratic opponent, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, showed his fidelity to strongman tactics. His calls for her imprisonment and allusions to her being shot were behaviors more readily associated with fascist states or military juntas.

Virility, in the form of the leader’s dominance over women and other men, has pride of place in his plans for national transformation.

Control over female bodies in the name of population growth is another constant, as are persecutions of LGBTQ+ individuals, who are seen as bearers of deviant and nonproductive sexualities.

Nostalgia for better times is also part of the equation, since the ruler’s vow is to make the country great again. This involves the fantasy of returning to an age when male authority was secure and women, people of color, and workers knew their places.

The dictator held a 1933 mass wedding for thousands in Rome, imposed an additional tax on bachelors over twenty-five years old, honored prolific mothers, and banned abortion and contraception.

The Nazis forcibly sterilized more than 200,000 “enemies of the Volk,” from “asocials” like alcoholics and the work-averse,

Hundreds of Afro-Germans were taken by the Gestapo from their schools and homes, with coerced permissions from their parents and guardians, tried by a commission of medical professionals for the crime of having a Black parent, and condemned to be sterilized.

fascist-style bonfires blazed with books taken from libraries

Racism had long been an axis of Trump’s national project and a space where the president’s own long-held racist beliefs mingled with those of his heterodox group of backers. These include Confederate flag–waving Southerners who never accepted the end of segregation and GOP politicians who fear immigration will cause “the browning of America.”

Muslims, Latinos, African Americans, and other people of color have been the targets of the Trump administration’s plan to remake American society in the image of White nationalism.

The intensity of the Trump administration’s efforts to undo decades of advances for women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities recalls earlier authoritarian counterrevolutions. Many conservatives may feel nostalgia for an America of unchallenged White male power, but Trump’s crusade to nullify Obama’s legacy has echoed the fixations of other personalist rulers.

At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is.

some of the most successful propaganda builds its falsehoods around a grain of truth. The perennial strongman message that foreigners are breaching the border to engage in criminal acts is one example.

Strongmen disappear people, and they also disappear knowledge that conflicts with their ideologies and goals.

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.

In strongman states, where speaking out can bring professional ruin or physical harm to you and your family, self-censorship can be a survival strategy.

Rallies were the fascist strongman’s favorite form of political theater

Making misogynist and racist comments to shift media attention away from their corruption and incompetence is a common tactic. In 2019, Trump called the late representative Elijah Cummings’s (D-MD) majority-Black congressional district “a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess” to turn attention away from Cummings’s investigation (as chair of the House Oversight Committee) of daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s use of private email accounts for state business.

“DON’T BELIEVE THE CRAP YOU SEE from these people, the fake news. . . . Just remember: what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” So declared Trump to a group of American veterans in 2018, continuing a century of strongman attempts to discredit and deny unflattering realities.

As with Berlusconi, governing for the scandal-ridden Trump has been about self-defense. He has claimed that a mainstream press dominated by liberals and the left conspires to silence him, but has tried to shut out journalists he sees as critics, as when he temporarily revoked access to White House press briefings for CNN’s Jim Acosta in 2018. He asked former FBI director James Comey about imprisoning reporters in 2017. “The fake news is creating violence,” he told reporters in 2018, preparing public opinion for future repressive measures against the press. By 2019, he was declaring in meetings attended by former national security adviser John Bolton and former defense secretary James Mattis that journalists should not just be jailed if they refused to divulge their sources, but physically eliminated. “These people should be executed. They are scumbags,” he said, sounding like strongmen from Mussolini to Putin.