Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Antifa readers take note. Our recent spate of authoritarian rulers is cut from the same cloth. They’re dudes, men’s men, bros convinced they’re more macho than anyone else. In Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat (lucid.substack.com) explores a century’s-worth of the type to reveal that their playbook is unchanging. Arising in times of great change, they tap into the fears of lost privilege (patriarchy, white power, etc.), creating resentment against other races, other cultures, other whatever, to construct an insular in-club where their base can feel it belongs. But their goal isn’t to soothe the savage beast of the raving populace, it’s self-directed, self-serving, a desire to use the apparatus of the state to enrich themselves. Ultimately, these sociopathic graspers must stay in office to avoid prosecution. In fact, many run to avoid prosecution in the first place. To escape the law, they become the law. And they can’t afford to ever let go. In short, don’t relax and assume democracy’s won. Trump and those like him are doing everything they can to return and take it all. Below, Ben-Ghiat explores the roots of fascism, the current crisis, and how we might fight to defeat it. And Conduit readers take note. One of our best tools is poetry.
steven lee beeber: Your book notes that followers of these leaders are motivated by fear. They worry that they are losing privilege, primarily the privilege of patriarchy. Does this help to explain why strongmen are so much about virility and strength?
ruth ben-ghiat : Yes. In exploring the last century of political history, I began to discern patterns. One of these is that the charismatic strongman (who generally comes from outside of politics) bursts onto the scene during periods of great social progress and change. These changes can be various—they can include worker’s rights, increased gender emancipation, racial equity. In response, masculinity becomes a kind of focal point for larger questions of the loss of male status in society, the loss of privilege. In the United States specifically, the loss of white, male, racial privilege. Masculinity becomes a handy way of addressing these changes. You have this strongman who poses as a controlling force. “I can fix it. I am your voice. I will make it better.” He’s a brutish figure, a dominant, hypermasculine male who addresses anxieties about men in general losing their authority. I didn’t expect that to recur so often, but it did. One of the interesting things is it was present even in places where you don’t have the white racial component. I covered Mobutu in the Congo, and Gaddafi in Libya, so these were anticolonial coups that were against white imperialists, but they still had the hypermasculinity thing. It is very much a part of authoritarianism over the past century.
conduit: I love how your book ties the pro-life movement to authoritarianism, noting that almost all strongmen encourage births and motherhood. Can you speak about this?
ben-ghiat: When we think of fascism, we always think about Hitler, and there are reasons for that (he became so dominant, he orchestrated the Holocaust), but it’s also important to think about Mussolini, because in the 1920s, long before Hitler came to power, Mussolini was already there. He was the first right-wing dictator, and he mapped out a kind of state program of white racial rescue. He was very concerned about non-white people, about anticolonial feeling. He thought demographic change was weakening the white race. And he was a journalist, so he had a way with words. He would say things like, “cradles are empty, and cemeteries are full in white Europe.” He created this whole demographic discourse that is echoed almost verbatim today by people like Orbán and some of the Republican politicians. So that is part of right-wing authoritarianism: this attempt to engineer the population to keep white hegemony going.
conduit: In regards to women, how can authoritarians appeal to the very people they victimize?
ben-ghiat: Well, strongmen are very good at creating communities of inclusion. The new national community, the elevated community, means excluding others to keep that community safe. In Nazi Germany, for instance, if you were an Aryan woman, you had way more status than a non-Aryan man. And it’s the same in Trump’s America. If you’re a white woman, you have way more status than an immigrant, Muslim, or African-American man. And Trump let you know that. It’s kind of a status thing. Another part of it is that these strongmen pose as protectors, as defenders. In Strongmen, I have Mussolini and Putin as bookends who strip their shirts off. They actually make their bodies the emblem of the nation. They become sex symbols, divos, objects of desire, stars. They stimulate different things in different people, and what’s fascinating is many of the things that they do repeat over a hundred years.
conduit: You note this especially in relation to Mussolini, the love letters that he received from the public, overtly sexual ones from women, “bromance”-style ones from men. What about Trump? Anything unique about his sexual appeal? Anything particularly American?
ben-ghiat: Very much so, because Trump came from TV. The way many Americans were introduced to him was through his reality show. So he’s not just a supposed business success and tycoon, he’s also a TV star. The other thing is that from very early on his profile was “The man who has it all. The man who has the most beautiful women, the biggest cars, the most of everything. And it’s never enough. And only he can have all of this because he takes charge.” Without getting overly psychoanalytic, this image can appeal to women as well as men. When the Access Hollywood tapes came out and he was caught saying, “When you’re a star you don’t even have to ask, you just grab them,” I realized that this wouldn’t hurt him, but would in fact help him, because I never saw him as an ordinary politician, I saw him as an authoritarian who for eight months already had been advertising his lawlessness. And indeed, to the frustration of many, it actually improved his ratings. And I thought, “ut oh.” It’s a formula. Duterte did the same thing in the Philippines, and so did Bolsonaro in Brazil later. They joked about raping women, they joked about being violent, and this was part of their appeal.