Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

How to combat this authoritarian ascendance is one of the most pressing matters of our time.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used the pandemic to complete his process of autocratic capture. He declared a state of emergency and then instituted rule by decree to give himself dictatorial powers. In Brazil, where democracy is under assault, President Jair Bolsonaro claimed that COVID-19 was no worse than the flu and fired his health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, for advising the public to practice social distancing. In each case, the leader’s priority was not to save lives, but to maintain or expand his power.

“NO HISTORIAN CAN GET INSIDE the heads of the dead . . . But with sufficient documentation, we can detect patterns of thought and action,” writes Robert Darnton.

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

government.

Populism is a common term for the parties and movements that carry forth this illiberal evolution of democratic politics. While populism is not inherently authoritarian, many strongmen past and present have used populist rhetoric that defines their nations as bound by faith, race, and ethnicity rather than legal rights. For authoritarians, only some people

are “the people,” regardless of their birthplace or citizenship status, and only the leader, above and beyond any institution, embodies that group. This is why, in strongman states, attacking the leader is seen as attacking the nation itself, and why critics are labeled “enemies of the people” or terrorists.

Strongmen argues that today’s leaders also have deeper roots. They recycle rhetoric and actions that go back to the dawn of authoritarianism in the 1920s and are invested in rehabilitating their autocratic predecessors. Putin has approved the erection of statues of Joseph Stalin in cities like Novosibirsk and Moscow, and Russian scholars who write about the mass graves of Stalin’s victims have been imprisoned.11 Berlusconi spread the lie that Mussolini “never killed anyone.” Bolsonaro makes the false claim that Nazism was a left-wing phenomenon. Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz sent fascist-nostalgia signals in 2018 when he called for an “axis of the willing” among Hungary, Italy, and Austria (all fascist or collaborationist states during World War II) to combat illegal migration. To understand today’s authoritarians and their allies, we need a historical perspective.

FOR A POLITICAL SYSTEM THAT affects the lives of so many, authoritarianism remains a surprisingly fuzzy concept. We still lack a common language to speak about the governments of twenty-first century authoritarian rulers who repress civil liberties but use elections to keep themselves in power. Orbán celebrates his transformation of Hungary into an “illiberal democracy,” using the term Fareed Zakaria coined in a landmark 1997 article in Foreign Affairs. More recently, labels like “hybrid regimes,” “electoral autocracies,” or “new authoritarianism” (the term used here) proliferate as scholars seek to classify this new wave of antidemocratic rule.13 A long view of the authoritarian style of governance, which highlights baseline features that recur in different historical circumstances, as well as what changes over time, can help us to understand authoritarianism as it manifests today. From Mussolini through Putin, all of the strongmen featured in this book establish forms of personalist rule, which concentrates enormous power in one individual whose own political and financial interests prevail

over national ones in shaping domestic and foreign policy. Loyalty to him and his allies, rather than expertise, is the primary qualification for serving in the state bureaucracy, as is participation in his corruption schemes. Personalist rulers can be long-lasting rulers, because they control patronage networks that bind people to them in relationships of complicity and fear.

Strongmen focuses on propaganda, virility, corruption, and violence, as well as the tools people have used to resist authoritarianism and hasten its fall.15 The practices and behaviors of today’s rulers—and those of their opponents—have their own histories.

I bring into focus histories of violence and plunder that are too rarely examined in a transnational and transhistorical frame.

Strongmen adds to discussions of authoritarianism by highlighting the importance of virility and how it works together with other tools of rule. The leader’s displays of machismo and his kinship with other male leaders are not just bluster, but a way of exercising power at home and conducting foreign policy. Virility enables his corruption, projecting the idea that he is above laws that weaker individuals must follow. It also translates into state policies that target women and LGBTQ+ populations, who are as much the strongman’s enemies as prosecutors and the press. Anti-colonial leaders like Mobutu and Ugandan president Amin were often as misogynist and anti-homosexual as their racist imperialist peers.

FOR ONE HUNDRED YEARS, charismatic leaders have found favor at moments of uncertainty and transition. Often coming from outside the political system, they create new movements, forge new alliances, and communicate with their followers in original ways. Authoritarians hold appeal when society is polarized, or divided into two opposing ideological camps, which is why they do all they can to exacerbate strife. 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.

From the start, authoritarians stand out from other kinds of politicians by appealing to negative experiences and emotions. They don the cloak of national victimhood, reliving the humiliations of their people by foreign powers as they proclaim themselves their nation’s saviors. Picking up on powerful resentments, hopes, and fears, they present themselves as the vehicle for obtaining what is most wanted, whether it is territory, safety from racial others, securing male authority, or payback for exploitation by

internal or external enemies.

It is [fear] that makes people so willing to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues . . . capable of cleansing the world of the vague, the weak, the uncertain, the evil. Ah, to give oneself over to their direction—what calm, what relief.

As he gains a following, the aspiring leader tests out tools like propaganda and corruption that will later help him rule. The decay of truth and democratic dissolution proceed hand in hand, starting with the insurgent’s assertion that the establishment media delivers false or biased information while he speaks the truth and risks everything to get the “real facts” out. Once his supporters bond to his person, they stop caring about his falsehoods. They believe him because they believe in him.19 Many future autocrats pose as fresh alternatives to a morally bankrupt political system, even if they have a police record (Mussolini, Hitler) or were under investigation (Trump, Putin, Berlusconi). “All they have ever cared about are their own interests and those of their corrupt followers,”

While not every ruler uses repression to get to power, all of them are skilled in the art of threat. Proclaiming a personal capacity for violence while running for office is a common twenty-first-century tactic, as when Trump declared he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any followers in January 2016. Some warn the nation that they intend to target certain categories of people. “I am telling the Filipino people not to vote for me, because it will be bloody,” declared Duterte in 2015 of his vow to kill thousands of drug dealers and criminals if elected president.

Shock events, or grave incidents that often prompt declarations of states of emergency, drive forward authoritarian history. They propel some individuals into office and give others who are already in power the excuse to do things they’ve wanted to do anyway, like securing their hold on government and silencing the opposition. In such situations, the temporary state of emergency may become normalized, “no longer the exception but the rule,” as the anti-Nazi philosopher Walter Benjamin put it. For a century, knowing how to capitalize on calamity, whether you had something to do with it or not, has been an essential strongman skill.

IN HIS 1931 BOOK The Technique of the Coup d’Etat, the Italian-Austrian journalist and writer Curzio Malaparte cautioned that Mussolini, in power for a decade, was “a modern man, cold, audacious, violent and calculating,” and predicted that Hitler, then rising in popularity due to the Depression, would be even worse. The Austrian might look like a waiter and rant like a fool, but Germans had acclaimed him as “an ascetic, a mystic of the cult of action,” just as many Italians had responded to Mussolini. If Hitler got into office, Malaparte warned, he would try to “corrupt, humble, and enslave the German people, in the name of German liberty, glory, and power.”23 Journalists, aides, and others who have witnessed the strongman’s dangerous character firsthand echo Malaparte’s chillingly accurate forecast. Authoritarianism has had vastly divergent outcomes as it evolved over a century. The fascists committed genocide, while twenty-first-century leaders tend to favor targeted assassinations and mass detention. This makes the coherence of the collective portrait that emerges, the traits of one ruler eerily echoing those of others, more striking. Hitler resembled many later leaders in being an indecisive and insecure ruler behind his all-powerful Führer facade, his opinions sometimes reflecting the last person he had spoken to. Mobutu was hardly the only authoritarian to be “obsessively concerned with slights to his Presidency,” as US ambassador to Zaire Brandon Grove asserted. No...

been marked by subordinates. He reads them with the air of a man seeking something,” in the journalist George Seldes’s 1935 observation. Putin continues the lineage of personalist rule in translating his private preoccupations with “loss of status, resentment, desire for respect, and vulnerability” into state policy.

The strongman’s impulsive and irascible nature (most have severe anger issues) and the “divide and rule” practices he follows to prevent anyone else from gaining too much power produce governments full of conflict and upheaval. Erdoğan’s unpredictable decision-making, which is worsened by surrounding himself with family members and flatterers, is typical. So is the time the authoritarian leader’s officials spend doing damage control when he has once again “insulted adversaries, undermined his aides, repeatedly changed course . . . and induced chaos.” Gaddafi took chaos to an extreme, repealing entire legal frameworks from one day to the next. Being unpredictable energized him, as it did Amin and others who “have ideas of grandeur, think that they have the answer to complicated problems and in a sense lose touch with reality,” in the words of Dr. David Barkham, Amin’s personal physician. Amin’s self-imposed title—His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular—says it all.

On one issue, the strongman has been consistent: his drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women, and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they produce babies, fight his enemies, and adulate him publicly. Each tool of his rule has its place within this scheme. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man. Repression creates confinement spaces full of captive bodies. Corruption lets him claim as his own the fruits of the nation’s labor. The writer Jon Lee Anderson sums up a common authoritarian pathology of possession: “the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear, the vaults, the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures”—anything that can chase away their fear of not having enough or losing what they already have. When they finally

depart office, dead or alive, there is a sense that “their mania had left room in the country for nothing else.”

Personalist rulers can be the most destructive kinds of authoritarians because they do not distinguish between their individual agendas and needs and those of the nation. Their private obsessions set the tone for public discourse, skew institutional priorities, and force large-scale resource reallocations, as happened most famously in Hitler’s war against the Jews. Authoritarian history is full of projects and causes championed by the ruler out of hubris and megalomania and implemented to disastrous effect. Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia to give Italy an empire bankrupted the Italian state. Mobutu’s massive projects for the Congo River—two Inga Falls dams and an Inga-Shaba power line—caused a debt crisis in Zaire. Trump’s border wall with Mexico has claimed federal funds meant for defense and disaster prevention.

Authoritarianism has been reputed to be an efficient mode of governance, but my study of the dynamics and costs of personalist rule shows that the opposite is true. If the leader or his inner circle is under investigation, governance revolves around his defense, with time and resources focused on exonerating him and punishing those who might expose him, like prosecutors and journalists. Killing dissident elites and driving entire families into exile squanders generations of talent. Seizing or ruining profitable businesses, some built up over decades, hurts the economy. Far from being a productive force, illiberal rule has had devastating consequences for the earth and many millions of its inhabitants.

“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

of his enemies, but the force that anoints him as the chosen one and maintains him in power.

In popular culture, the strongman’s brand of charisma is often depicted as a spellbinding force that makes people do his bidding. Yet theorist Max Weber made it clear a century ago that charisma, which he defined as the attribution of “supernatural, superhuman, or at least especially exceptional powers or qualities” to an “individual personality,” exists mostly in the eye of the beholder. Most strongmen have uncommon powers of persuasion. Their followers and collaborators are the ones to “make” their reputations, though, by acknowledging their abilities. This makes the leader’s charismatic authority inherently unstable. His aura of specialness can dissipate if public opinion changes, leaving him without any legitimacy, unlike in dynastic and other f...

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 who sign on tend to stick with the leader through gross mismanagement, impeachment, or international humiliation.

Foreign elites also prop up strongmen. This book highlights two categories of enablers.

Deutsche Bank has funded authoritarian states

Financial institutions

allow strongmen to hide their illicit wealth in anonymous accounts and shell corporations abroad. So did the Swiss, whose vaults and banks, ruled by banking secrecy until 2018, store some of the money

Public relations and lobbying firms have also played a prominent role, advertising strongman states as productive and stable. Charm offensives help to cover over the chaos and corruption. “The more trouble the client was in, the better the party,” recalled an associate of Edward von Kloberg III, who represented Ceausescu, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, and Mobutu.33

THE HISTORY OF THE STRONGMAN can make for difficult reading. These rulers promise a bright national future, but the emotions they elicit are bleak. The line between everyday life and horror in their states can be razor-thin. Amin entertained diplomats at Kampala’s swanky Nile Hotel, enjoying the knowledge that his security forces were beating dissidents in the basement. Pinochet’s military made some leftists watch the torture of people they knew on a blue-lit “stage.” Gaddafi had a “Department of Protocol” to procure his sexual captives. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt argued, authoritarian states thrive on the synergy of bureaucracy and violence.

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: The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.30

Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci,

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.

Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition.

As leaders stabilize their rule, they use propaganda to legitimate their authority.

Authoritarian states invest heavily in the manipulation, falsification, and concealment of information.

some of the most successful propaganda builds its falsehoods around a grain of truth.

Propaganda may seem to be all about noise, but silence and absence are equally important to its operation. Strongmen disappear people, and they also disappear knowledge that conflicts with their ideologies and goals.

The history of propaganda is also a history of its failure. The same mechanisms that make propaganda effective can lessen its impact. Repetition can cause people to tune messages out.

Years of indoctrination to one truth can also lead to the cynical conclusion that there is no truth and nothing means anything.

Propaganda needs propagandists,

The hypnotism lessons he took from Erik Jan Hanussen and the voice lessons from the actor Emil Jannings

paid off.