Strongmen Quotes

“Many strongmen, past and present, have used populist rhetoric that defines their nations as bound by faith, race, and ethnicity rather than by 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 state itself, and why critics are labeled enemies of the people or terrorists.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.32”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“As leaders stabilize their rule, they use propaganda to legitimate their authority. Discrediting the press is a kind of insurance policy. When journalists turn up evidence of the government’s violence or corruption, the public will already be accustomed to seeing them as partisan.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“The civil war that brought Franco to power started when the center-right refused to accept the results of the February 1936 election that brought a Popular Front government of left-wing parties to power, sparking cycles of violence and rumors of a coup.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“The cults that rose up around Mussolini and Hitler in the early 1920s answered anxieties about the decline of male status, the waning of traditional religious authority, and the loss of moral clarity.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“The special psychological climate that strongmen create among their people—the thrill of transgression mixed with the comfort of submitting to his power—endows life with energy, purpose, and drama.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“Mussolini lacked one last guarantee of his survival: international legitimation and economic aid. In 1926, J. P. Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, another Fascist proselytizer, brokered a $100 million loan from the American government to the regime. Implicitly sanctioning Mussolini’s power grab, the act started a century of US support for right-wing authoritarian leaders.21”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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.10”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“Designed for instant impact and encouraging feelings of omnipotence, Twitter is the perfect tool for an impulsive, attention-addicted strongman.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“Many strongmen who come to power by coup leave it in the same fashion. Two-thirds of dictators were removed by coups between 1950 and 2000.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“IN PROPAGANDA AS IN LOVE, anything is permissible which is successful,” said Nazi minister Goebbels, who oversaw, with Hitler, one of the most comprehensive campaigns of mass persuasion in history.3”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“The Führer was sent to us from God, though not in order to save Germany, but to ruin it” was one German’s judgment of the outcome of Hitler’s national project.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“Dictatorships put people to sleep, and the only ones brave enough to fight it are youth,” said taxi driver Renato Gomez, a witness to years of Chilean protests in Santiago.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“A critical mass of visible protestors can remind international funders and the strongman’s domestic allies that enabling him can have consequences.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“Only too late do some realize that the destructive energies the leader unleashes can be turned against them. In the strongman’s world, everyone, torturers included, can be discarded when his or her usefulness has ended.11”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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. Making all political activity bolster his own authority allowed Franco to stay in power in Spain for thirty-six years.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“A great privilege of life under democracies—taking freedom for granted—becomes a weakness when that freedom is under assault.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“Violence is at the heart of the authoritarian bargain between the leader and followers who relinquish rights in exchange for economic gain and power.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“World War I had created the conditions for the age of fascist takeovers, and World War II prepared the age of military coups.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“MANY STUDIES POINT TO recent historical events to explain today’s turn away from democracy, like the 2008 recession and increases in global migration that heightened racist sentiments. Other works go back to the collapse of Communism in 1989–1990. Unleashing nationalist and tribalist sentiments in Eastern Europe, it encouraged the resurgence of the far right in Western Europe as well. Putin, the former Communist functionary who is now a leader of the global right, successfully rode that tide of political upheaval and ideological transformation”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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 1919 Versailles Treaty deprived Germany of its colonies, and the Paris Peace Conference that produced the treaty recognized the world’s first independent Arab state, the Tripolitanian Republic, inside Italian Libya.6”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“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. It has no pages on how to deal with becoming a national disgrace, someone who is pelted with tomatoes and eggs when he appears in public after leaving office, like Pinochet, or forced into exile, like Amin.”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present