“A DICTATOR IS IN GENERAL a man who comes from below and then throws himself in an even deeper hole . . . the world watches him . . . and jumps into the void after him,” said Charlie Chaplin in 1939, capturing the authoritarian leader-follower dynamic.28 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
