More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
When the ruler himself is under investigation, governance becomes secondary to his attempt to escape prosecution. He domesticates the press and the judiciary and increases loyalty demands on his party to avoid leaks. He might have laws changed to accommodate his malfeasance or amend the Constitution to prolong his stay in office and retain his immunity.
Two trends mark strongman kleptocracy in the twenty-first century. First is the illegal takeover by authoritarians of profitable businesses, often with the excuse of cleansing the state of enemy influences.
Second, leaders and their elite allies launder money through real estate investments and joint ventures abroad with legitimate partners.
As in other countries, the rise of authoritarianism in America has meant the end of accountability and ethical standards in government.
In the strongman tradition, Trump has used divide-and-rule and bullying tactics to weed out government officials who won’t conspire in his corruption and subversion of the rule of law.
Comey described corruption as a process. It starts with the act of staying silent in a meeting while his lies “wash over you, unchallenged,” making you and others present into “co-conspirators.” It continues with requests for public tributes and escalates to attacks on institutions, including the one you serve.
With each compromise, you hope he will be satisfied, but he returns to ask for more. What he wants—what all strongmen want—is to make you his: “You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values. And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.”64
Communist and fascist regimes, which came out of World War I’s routinized slaughter, made violence the central means and often the end of political struggle. Institutionalized violence creates new hierarchies and power structures, new heroes and martyrs, and new norms and expectations.
However they use it, strongmen give violence an instrumental as well as absolute value. They believe that not everyone is born equal, and most also feel that not everyone has the right to life. Some people must be sacrificed for the good of the nation, and others simply get in the way.3
Propaganda encourages everyone in the country to see violence differently: as a national and civic duty and the price of making the country great.
Authoritarian states have always promoted individuals who are willing to experiment with repression as a way of reshaping the nation,
Violence is at the heart of the authoritarian bargain between the leader and followers who relinquish rights in exchange for economic gain and power.5
The public humiliation of prominent male enemies reinforces cults of virility.
For one hundred years, the strongman has guided the societies he rules through a transformation of culture and morals that legitimates harming others. While the satisfaction of following orders is part of the appeal for collaborators, authoritarian states also attract individuals who thrive in situations where inhibitions can be freed.
Nazism had always held out the prospect of material gain as an incentive for participating in the state’s persecutions of its enemies. This mattered even more when the goal was annihilation.
Krassnoff showed S. how “states of exception can be normalized in people,” creating individuals who see the violence they inflict as righteous and purifying.
New authoritarians like the Turkish president tend to warehouse enemies outside of public scrutiny. They use targeted violence, information manipulation, and legal harassment to neutralize dissenters. They also attempt to impoverish them by expropriating any businesses they or their relatives might own. Each ruler finds his own formula, gauging the tolerance of elites and the public for violence. National traditions of detention and histories of repression also factor in.
The relativizing reasoning previewed Trump’s own application of the authoritarian playbook, which presents the leader’s measures against his enemies as necessary and justified.62
In the tradition of the fascists, Trump uses his rallies to train his followers to see violence in a positive light.
Like past strongmen, Trump used propaganda, corruption, and the cult of male force to create a climate favorable to persecution.
Of the approximately 400,000 people who spent time in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in 2018, 70 percent had no criminal record (a change from previous administrations’ policies). Racism, rather than crime prevention, has driven his policies. “Trump is building a deportation machine,” charged Congress’s Hispanic Caucus in August 2019.64
Trump used repetition and other propaganda techniques to guide the public to see his treatment of immigrants as necessary for the nation’s safety.
Yet the scale of these forced separations—almost 70,000 in 2019—brings Trump’s practices in line with states like Hitler’s Germany and Pinochet’s Chile, where children were taken from Jewish, leftist, and indigenous parents to be raised by more “appropriate” individuals.
The history of strongmen is also the history of their opponents’ efforts to remove them from power.
Maria Castro, a member of the far-left Chilean MIR, spent fourteen years in “internal exile.” “What kept us going during those years was a very deep conviction that dictatorship was an evil too great for our people . . . that we had to resist, that each one had his or her work to do,” she recalled.3
Most resistance in strongman states is non-violent, though, and unarmed protest has been among the most effective.
Public art and messaging proclaim the existence of individuals who are “refusing to accept the disinformation and lies . . . refusing to accept the abnormal as normal,” in the words of the Chilean graphic artist Guillo.
A critical mass of visible protestors can remind international funders and the strongman’s domestic allies that enabling him can have consequences.5 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.
Protests can also be stark refutations of the leader’s claim on the body and soul, as in cases of self-immolation, which draw attention to injustice and call to others to do something about it.
The history of resistance is also the history of what people of all ages don’t do. In societies predicated on compliance, refusing to act sends a powerful message. Not listening to the radio when the leader speaks, not performing the Hitler salute (Elser observed both of these habits), or not sending your children to state youth activities all had repercussions.
Exile is the fate of many politically active individuals targeted by the state. While most resettle in democracies, immigration and employment circumstances can mean that resisters temporarily exchange one regime for another.
Signed by “the White Rose Society,” it presented Germans with a shocking demand: Adopt passive resistance—resistance—wherever you are, and block the functioning of this atheistic war machine before it is too late . . . and the last youth of our nation bleeds to death because of the hubris of a subhuman. Don’t forget that every people gets the government it deserves!
“I had to act out of my inner conviction and I believed this inner obligation was more binding than the oath of loyalty I had given as a soldier,” Hans Scholl told Gestapo interrogators, explaining his actions.22
Many Germans accepted Hitler’s rule but took issue with certain policies, such as eugenics measures or the encroachment of Nazi ideology on religious liberties.
Governments also flood the social media platforms they do permit with trolls and misinformation and use digital infiltration to track dissidents at home and in exile. Today’s resistance collectives include coders and encryption specialists who find workarounds for government censorship. They access virtual private networks and adapt apps like Tinder
Putin’s solution—amending the Russian constitution to stay in office until 2036—is a sign of weakness rather than strength.51
Individuals from within the political system have also played prominent roles in responding to the Trump administration’s assaults on American democracy. Some pursue grassroots activism, as with the Indivisible movement created by former congressional staffers in December 2016. Others engage in legal pushback, like Protect Democracy, founded by former Department of Justice lawyers.64 Civil servants have waged bureaucratic resistance by delaying implementation of executive orders they find unconscionable. Some have documented unethical behavior.
Sustained mass protest requires opportunity, organization, and motivation born of outrage and the transcendence of fear.
“Polarization is a universal problem,” he says. “All around the world, populism is used to divide and rule. But I believe we can turn this trend upside down.” Imamoğlu’s victory holds out the possibility of a different future for Turkey and sends a message to strongmen everywhere.76
THE AUTHORITARIAN PLAYBOOK has no chapter on failure. It does not foresee the leader’s own people turning against him, from military men he trained to young people he indoctrinated to women he rewarded for having babies.
Aging and the ebbing of virile powers is difficult for leaders whose “entire sense of self is bound up in being revered,” in psychological profiler Jerrold Post’s words.
“You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you,” said the president, who showed familiarity with the anxieties about irrelevance that spur authoritarians’ demands for loyalty and attention, especially in the end stage of rule.3
It’s not surprising that most authoritarians leave office involuntarily. They are supremely ill equipped to handle the downward arc of leadership and life. They have trouble abandoning personal traits like hubris, aggression, and greed that served them to stay in power, even when these become self-defeating. Their theft of national revenue and resources may leave them unable to continue to fund the spoils system that kept elites loyal to them, leading to their loss of legitimacy. Believing propaganda about their infallibility can also be lethal.
Democratic heads of state often see their departures from office as an opportunity to build on their leadership legacy. The authoritarian regards the end of being adulated by followers and controlling everything and everyone as an existential threat.
Strongmen will do anything to stay in office, even starting wars or deepening involvement in doomed conflicts,
Political scientists call this phenomenon “gambling for resurrection,” and almost all autocrats lose the wager.6
Mussolini had promised to tame corruption in Italy, but twenty years later, Fascism had become a symbol for many Italians of “racketeering, exploitation of the weak, injustice, immorality,” as an informer reported in 1942.
The partisan Ada Gobetti, whose publisher husband Piero Gobetti had died in 1926 after being beaten by Fascists, saw the resistance as the recovery of “a bond of solidarity, founded not on a community of blood, country, or intellectual tradition, but on a simple human relationship, the feeling of being at one with many.”17
His writings during the period, published in summer 1944 in the Corriere della sera, display the authoritarian’s capacity to blame others for the messes he causes. “It’s not surprising that people destroy the idols of their own creation. Perhaps it is the only way to bring them [the idols] down to human proportions,” he wrote of his fall from power, as though his repression and incompetency had nothing to do with his fate.
Like all strongmen, the Führer lacked empathy.
