Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a rare example of the fortunate academic whose subject matter, through no actions of her own, becomes of intense public interest. What she spent a career studying was the rise of Benito Mussolini, the early 20th Century radical who subverted the institutions of democracy to turn Italy into a dictatorship – and who literally coined the term “fascism.” Like Timothy Snyder whose expertise is the rise of Adolf Hitler, another fascist who consciously copied Mussolini and eventually exceeded him in infamy, Ben-Ghiat has found herself an in-demand public intellectual interviewed everywhere including The Intercept (“Is This Trump’s Reichstag Fire Moment?”, Jun 4, 2020), Medium (“Fascism Expert: Don’t Expect Trump To Leave WH, If He Loses”, by Manny Otiko, Jun 12, 2020), and Salon ( “Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Trump and the bitter American truth: ‘We do not have a real democracy’”, by Chauncey DeVega, Jul 23, 2020), asked to recommend five books by other writers on fascism, and herself writing numerous articles in the popular press, recently for CNN (“For Trump, reality is just a prop he doesn’t care to use”, Aug 28, 2020).
But it was the headnote to her article a few years ago in The Washington Post (“When investigators threatened his power, he declared himself dictator”, Jun 19, 2018) that mentioned a forthcoming book, Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall, that caused me to send her a note asking about its publication date. The title alone promised to gather together the threads common to subversion of democracy into what she terms the “authoritarian playbook,” a guide for what to expect when classical liberalism is crumbling around you. She replied, now more than two years ago, “I am still writing the book so alas it won’t appear before 2019.” The title has been shortened to Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, and it is due for release Nov 10, 2020 – a week after an election that will decide, hopefully, who is to be president for the next four years. But if there is any consistent theme to her work, it is that strongmen will do literally anything to retain power, employing money, lies, and even paramilitary violence when threatened.
Ben-Ghiat’s previously most well known work is probably Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (2004), a distinctly academic treatise arguing that a defining characteristic of Mussolini’s fascism was the reactionary suppression of modern art and culture in a way that would still allow economic development. At the time, especially in the aftermath of the First World War and Russian revolutions that provoked many thoughtful artistic and literary attempts to make sense of the shattering experience, it was commonly assumed that authoritarian societies, such as Czarist Russia, had to sacrifice economic development because it would necessarily lead to modernization of culture and the acceptance of ideas that would threaten the conservative foundations of the society. Mussolini’s novel idea is a commonplace to us today, who from the benefit of hindsight can see similar trends from Nazi campaigns against “degenerate art” to China’s embrace of what is officially called “Xi Jinping Thought.” Nor is this a new observation, as she readily concedes beginning her book citing art critic Renato Poggioli from 1934, one of many who perceived the war as the disintegration of Europe itself. (Poggioli, on the run from Mussolini in 1938, would flee to professorships at Brown and Harvard, which is why his daughter Sylvia, now a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, was born in Providence in 1946.) It became Poggioli’s post-Second World War ambition to restore the avant-garde lost to Italian culture from decades under Mussolini.
Strongmen is far more entertaining than it has any right to be, opening with a description set in 2008 of Italian strongman Silvio Berlusconi having sex on a bed named for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. I’m not supposed to quote from an advanced uncorrected proof in case it is changed before publication, but I can’t resist this one-sentence pseudo-academic disclaimer and its subtle implication that actually had me laughing out loud: “Whether the bed was a gift from Vladimir Putin or the former Russian president and then-prime minister had merely slept there is unclear.” She then mentions Two-Headed Anomaly, a play by Dario Fo and Franca Rame in which, in its original version, Putin dies and his brain is transplanted into Berlusconi, but, in a later revision, Berlusconi dies and his brain is transplanted into Putin. (For background on Dario Fo, see my “Accidental Death of an Anarchist: Ha Ha, Only Serious”, Jun 28, 2017). In the course of her introduction, she manages to cite both Charlie Chaplin and Hannah Arendt.
Of course, no one is reading this book for juicy gossip about Putin and Berlusconi, nor for the wit of Fo and Chaplin, but rather because of the resurgence of the authoritarian strongman type of leaders, most notably in Donald Trump, emerging within democracies that they then subvert. Ben-Ghiat identifies common techniques shared by strongmen as otherwise varied as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Muammar Gaddafi, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Mobutu Sese Seko, Silvio Berlusconi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, with “cameo appearances” by Idi Amin, Mohamed Siad Barre, Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Nahrendra Modi, and Viktor Orbán. I’ve published a list pretty close to that myself (“Opinion: We the People, Establishing Rule of Law”, Apr 3, 2019) and even explicitly discussed the literary tradition of American fascism a week before Trump was elected (“Donald Trump: At Long Last, Have You No Sense of Decency?“, Nov 2, 2016), but Ben-Ghiat’s study is extensive, thorough, and systematic. Importantly, she avoids discussing strongman leaders who came to power in already authoritarian systems, such as Stalin and Mao, narrowing her focus to how democracy itself can be exploited to its own detriment. Mussolini, whom Ben-Ghiat describes as “the first man to transform a democracy into a dictatorship,” is the pole star around which her academic expertise causes the others to revolve.
Ben-Ghiat argues that strongmen leaders rely upon a combination of propaganda, violence, corruption, and virility to acquire and retain power. Some of that may be obvious, but she assigns more weight to corruption and virility than most analysts. Corruption is essential, she asserts, because in a democratic system it is the mechanism by which an authoritarian leader makes others personally loyal to the leader, paying them off either tangibly or intangibly in order to get them to sell out their ideals and principles.
We see this now with Trump, who remains the darling of evangelical Christians despite well-documented moral lapses, including being credibly accused of sexual misconduct including physical assault by about two dozen women, which goes to the strange idea of “prosperity gospel” that wealth is proof of divine favor, a theology described by mainstream Christians as “aberrant” and “occult.” Allegations of sexual assault, Ben-Ghiat argues, are a feature rather than a bug of the strongman personality cult, where “virility” in the misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ sense is proof of leadership ability. To my knowledge, she is the first to recognize the significance of virility and its machismo play-acting, giving it such prominence in its own right that it gets its own entire chapter. Corruption, in particular, has consequences in a democracy: it drives out competence in favor of personal loyalty, as we’ve seen with Trump repeatedly in everything from his revolving-door cabinet, replete with acting appointees never seeking constitutionally mandated advice and consent from the Senate, to the promotion of anti-scientific miracle drugs rather than basic public health measures to address a COVID-19 pandemic that, as of this writing, has killed 200,000 Americans.
Strongmen, somewhat like Caesar after his assassination, is divided into three parts: how strongmen rise to power, how they maintain power, and how they lose power. Healthy democracies where the people share a sense of purpose, Ben-Ghiat argues, are not susceptible to a strongman leader who exploits polarization by appealing to a conservative impulse among those who feel unmoored by their cultural reference points slipping away, making the strongman in a democracy a distinctly right-wing rather than left-wing phenomenon. Exactly what these segments of society are and their reference points can vary, but a typical example would be male White Christians who see themselves as the only “real Americans” and in danger of losing their historical privileges. Soon the factions that attach themselves to a strongman embrace his cult of personality, no longer caring about his lies and falsehoods as his denunciations of truth and reality, especially his attacks on journalists and the press, become part of their group identity reinforcing their irrational faith and shared delusions become a badge of honor.
Mussolini, Ben-Ghiat writes, set the pattern for acquiring power as a weak minority – his Fascists got 0.4% of the vote in 1921 – by aligning with mainstream conservatives who saw him as a useful tool against communism, and Hitler and Franco were able to do substantially the same. A big part of their appeal was that they had personally loyal paramilitaries ready to do political dirty work, including assassination and murder, but eventually it was those very paramilitaries who made democratic resistance impossible once the mainstream conservatives realized too late that their deals were with the devil. In 1925 then-prime minister Mussolini declared himself dictator above the law to stop a criminal investigation into the murder of his political opponent, the theme of Ben-Ghiat’s 2018 article referenced above where I first saw the announcement of her book. Trump may say that he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any political support (“Donald Trump ‘Fifth Avenue’ Comment”, by Kim LaCapria, Jan 24, 2016) and may lead “Lock her up!” chants about Hillary Clinton (“‘Lock Her Up’ Becomes More Than a Slogan”, by Peter Baker, Nov 14, 2017), but Ben-Ghiat points out the historical precedents, writing “some rules of strongman behavior haven’t changed: Always warn people what you’re going to do to them, and, for maximum intimidation, be sure to refer to your personal capacity for violence and criminality.” Would mainstream Republicans who have fallen into line behind Trump to enhance their personal power, such as Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, tolerate comparable lawless violence – and, of greater practical concern, would they be able to stop it if they wanted to?
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, to be published Nov 10, 2020, by W.W. Norton. wwnorton.com/books/strongmen
