Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

“I know how to create, I know how to lead people, I know how to make people love me,” he said in 1996, summing up key strongman talents.

All strongmen construct systems of rule meant to minimize the possibility of an undoing of their personal power,

Returning to a disintegrating Soviet Union strengthened Putin’s idea that democratization brought weak leadership and social unrest.

Strongmen don’t differentiate between personal and national interests, and for Putin a strong state was also a means of self-protection.

the crisis rhetoric and positioning of the male leader as savior also followed a formula used by every strongman from Mussolini onward.

“Criminals got to go somewhere,” said one New York City real estate broker of Trump Tower, Trump’s residence and Trump Organization headquarters. Drug traffickers like Joseph Wiechselbaum, arms dealers like Adnan Kashoggi, and dictators like Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti all lived there. So did the Russian Mafia–connected real estate developer Felix Sater, who was convicted of securities fraud in the 1990s.

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. “I am your voice,” he told Americans who felt economically vulnerable and ill at ease in an increasingly multiracial society, his “protector” persona echoing past rulers who vowed to shoulder the nation’s burdens.

For a century, strongmen have believed that society must be disrupted to allow a new order to take hold.

Rituals like the “Heil Hitler” salute are central to the effort of collective transformation. They help the leader to train the bodies and minds of his people. Hitler borrowed the straight-armed gesture from Mussolini and made it mandatory within the NSDAP in 1926, ignoring complaints that he was imitating Il Duce. All German civil servants had to use it after July 1933, and it soon became a social norm and civic duty. The addition of a verbal greeting that named Hitler specifically (heil meaning health or salvation as well as to hail) boosted his personality cult. It also turned everyday moments into tests of political fidelity, since the salute required a visible gesture of physical submission to the leader—

its real aim was to sap everyone’s dignity and damage the bonds of civil society—a crucial goal of every authoritarian regime.

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.

Strongman national projects generally leverage three time frames and states of mind: utopia, nostalgia, and crisis.

Utopia, the desire for a pristine and perfect community, links to the leader’s promise to obtain what his people feel the country lacks or has been deprived of. Whether this is modernity and international prestige or the right to expansion, it always involves a glowing future that redeems a bleak present.

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.

Strongmen may also cite law-and-order governments of the national past to justify degrading democracy,

Crisis time justifies states of emergency and the scapegoating of enemies who endanger the country from inside the nation or across the border.

It also links to a conception of the state as an organic entity with the right to defend itself from threats to its safety and the right to expand into foreign territory to secure the resources it needs. Versions of this mode of thought and strategy, generally known as geopolitics, run through strongman history,

As the strongman pulls the faithful to him, a parallel nation takes shape abroad—those forced to leave the country in order to stay alive.

One final principle anchors the sweeping changes that come with authoritarian rule: the leader’s claim that he does not just represent the nation, as do democratic heads of state, but embodies it and bears its sorrows and dreams.

The divine blessing bestowed upon the ruler’s actions is a consistent theme of personality cults.

Encouraging the healthy to grow and protecting the nation by confining the unhealthy or helping them to perish: this was the Fascist logic of reclamation (bonifica) that would inspire strongman states for a century.

Strongmen probe the sore spots of the nation, stimulating feelings of humiliation and anxiety and offering their own leadership as a salve.

Strongman states turn the ruler’s obsessions into policy.

By the end of 1975, the regime had expelled 24,000 faculty, staff, and students, with thousands sent to prison. Allende’s American translator Marc Cooper, visiting that year with a false passport, found Chilean universities veiled by a “self-imposed and discreet silence,” just as the dictatorship intended.25

“Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin,” wrote Gaddafi in the Green Book that became his political religion’s bible. Gaddafi’s national project revolved around anti-imperialism and the promotion of his versions of Socialism and Islam.

For Gaddafi, ridding the country of foreign cultural and economic influences was part of correcting imperial injustices. Over time, languages other than Arabic disappeared from shop windows and restaurant menus, and bonfires blazed with books and Western musical instruments, recalling the practices of the right-wing leaders he so despised. A “Libya First” policy awarded all government contracts to Libyans and required that businesses be Libyan headed and 51 percent Libyan owned and staffed.

Gaddafi was not about to jeopardize his profits for ideological purity. Thicker than blood, and far more precious to him than human life, oil was the real fuel of his national project.33

A skilled provocateur, the Libyan leader did not hesitate to play on Western fears of dark and fertile forces endangering White Christian civilization, especially when Muslims came to symbolize the enemy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America.

“CATHOLIC FAITH, NATION, PATRIA, FAMILY, ORDER”—with these words, Berlusconi’s right-hand man Dell’Utri summed up the core values of Forza Italia and Berlusconi’s national project in 2002.

“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.

He detained and demonized migrants, promoted the agendas of autocrats like Putin, and exercised authoritarian and personalist leadership in a nominal open society. This Berlusconi formula would soon be exported to America.

The militant version of Orthodox Christianity favored under Putin supports his view of LGBTQ+ individuals as dangerous to the social body. Homosexuality was decriminalized after the fall of Communism, but Putin made same-sex adoptions illegal in 2014. Many same-sex couples have emigrated due to the hostile climate.46

The economic growth of the early 2000s, together with laws restricting abortion rights (2003) and granting eighteen months of partly paid maternity leave (2007), helped births to exceed deaths by the year 2013.

Greedy for riches and territory and haunted by the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Putin seeks national greatness by expanding beyond current borders. He’s used conventional military operations to pursue Eurasian domination,

He also acts abroad through political warfare meant to undermine Western democracies. His government has promoted Californian and Catalan secessionist movements and uses disinformation campaigns to aid foreign candidates and causes that benefit Russia (Trump and Brexit are two examples).

At home, too, manipulating belief is Putin’s key to staying in power. In the strongman tradition, he needs his people to think that there is no alternative to his rule.

“He says what we’re thinking and what we want to say,” a Trump supporter had enthused at a 2018 rally in Montana, echoing a century of enthusiasm for leaders who have the courage to “pronounce clearly what others only whisper,” as Margherita Sarfatti said of Mussolini.49

Omar, a frequent Trump critic, became an easy target for those who wish to purify the nation by ejecting people of the wrong faith and color.

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.

Neutralizing those who might expose the leader’s wrongdoing has been a priority of strongman governments from Mussolini onward.

A sweeping purge started with the Turkish army and continued with the Kurdish opposition, individuals associated with Gülen’s Hizmet movement, and members of the judiciary, the press, and academics. The coup plotters who survived got life in prison. The Turkish leader also replenished state finances in the favored authoritarian manner, seizing over 600 businesses with a collective valuation of over $10 billion during the second half of 2016. By July 2020, over 170,000 people had been dismissed from state positions; over 94,000 had been jailed, many on charges of terrorism; 3,000 schools and universities had closed; and thousands of Turks, including entrepreneurs and journalists, had gone into exile.58

As so often with strongmen, direct communications with the people at a fateful moment proved decisive.

The strongman brand of nationalism is founded on emotions of fear and victimhood. Stoking past and present grievances is as important as optimistic visions of what the nation could become.

“IN PROPAGANDA AS IN LOVE, anything is permissible which is successful,” said Nazi minister Goebbels,

personality cults share an important quality of celebrity: the object of desire must seem accessible, but also be remote and untouchable. Central to the strongman’s propaganda strategies, such cults also enable his other tools. They leverage his cult of virility by depicting him as the nation’s protector. They also justify the use of force against “enemies of the state”—that is, anyone who dares to question his miracle-working powers.4

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.

authoritarians have had direct communications channels with the public, allowing them to pose as authentic interpreters of the popular will. Rallies have long been a favored means of contact, but rulers also use radio, newsreels, television, and social media to help them maintain their charismatic authority.

Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition. The state disseminates the same message through multiple channels and institutions to synchronize society around the leader’s person and his ideological priorities. It mobilizes sound, visual, and print media, architecture, ritual, and more to drip-feed slogans and ways of thinking, leading individuals “in the same direction, but differently,” as the sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote in 1965.6

Whatever the medium, a paradoxical truth holds: the more skilled the leader is at this mediatized politics, the more his admirers see him as authentic and feel a personal connection with him.

Radio has been a propaganda powerhouse for autocrats from Mussolini onward. More affordable for consumers than television, the cinema, and the Internet, radio is also accessible to the illiterate, and can be listened to while one is working or performing other tasks. Television then replaced it as the authoritarian’s ideal medium for connecting with the people as it spread his ideas through children’s shows, documentaries, and news.