Electoral Autocracy: The Ruth Ben-Ghiat Interview
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, explains all the ways Trump and Republican leaders rely on the dictator's playbook to weaken our democracy and consolidate power. A Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University, she provides chilling insights into Mussolini, Berlusconi, Trump, and other strongmen that ruled through destructive cults of personlity. This is a discussion not to miss.
Show Notes for This Episode Are Available Here
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books; The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're here with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, and the author of the extraordinary, must-read book that I'm a huge fan of, Strong Men: From Mussolini to the Present. Strong Men is a sweeping and engrossing study of the dictator's playbook, including the propaganda, corruption and nepotism employed by President Donald Trump. Ruth contributes to CNN and other leading outlets about the history of fascism, the threat of authoritarianism today and how to protect and strengthen democracy. We're very excited to welcome Ruth to our show to talk about Strong Men. Welcome, Ruth.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Thank you, I'm thrilled to be here.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right. I am freaking out over your book because I love it so much. Doing all of this research on authoritarianism for all these many years, living with this stuff, I love when you have a one-stop shop for all your dictatorship needs, for just understanding the whole scope of the horror show of the last century, of the rise of the strong men.
Andrea Chalupa:
One thing that really stuck out to me with your book is how we think of the 1930s as a time of just unimaginable manufactured mass murder. The mouth of Hell just opened up across Eastern and Central Europe and so forth. One thing that's really interesting is how the staggering mass death and horror of World War I, the Great War, the flu pandemic, all of that mass death of that earlier period, it essentially normalized the mass murder that came a decade or so later with the rise of fascism, and communism and so forth. Could you comment on that?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yeah, that's a very important point. There wouldn't have been fascism in its form it took without World War I, because those movements came straight out of World War I. They drew on soldiers who didn't want to demobilize, or were so traumatized they couldn't demobilize, and it brought the war home. In Italy, it was much quicker. The war ended in 1918, and by 1922 Mussolini was prime minister of Italy, and Hitler took a lot longer.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
But, many empires fell during World War I, including the Russian and the Russian Revolution happened in the middle of World War I. By the 1920s, you had these two—first with Lenin, and later in the decade Stalin, and then you had Mussolini through the whole '20s—who were tracing out this template of what autocracy might look like. Mussolini, in particular, there was no model for what he was doing. He coined the term totalitarian in 1925, and there was a lot of cross-referencing between communists and fascists.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
But World War I, it was such a mass trauma. The wounds that were made on bodies were new. The scale of the psychological damage was new, and so it desensitized people to killing, to hearing about killing, to having their lives turned upside down.
Andrea Chalupa:
That obviously normalized this whole mass death, and things just kept getting worse and worse. Dictatorship has long been a part of human history. Since the start of human history we've given the dictator different names from emperor, king and so on. How is the strongman that we've seen over the last 100 years or so different?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yes, always been tyrants, obviously. But, the modern authoritarians, they need mass society, they need mass media. For example, the personality cult, which is such an interesting topic because the rules of personality cults, like the leader has to be the everyman and also the superman, they haven't really changed for 100 years. But, what you needed was mass communications and the beginning of mass surveillance. You needed transportation, communication, all of these things about the infrastructure of mass society that allowed states to have the reach over their people that they did.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Mass communications is very, very important because propaganda works on the principles of repetition, and also saturation. And in a dictatorship, there's this idea of synchronization, that the same messages are played throughout society in slightly different ways through education, through all the different media, even sports teams, anything in civil society. That's synchronization. To pull that off, you need mass communications.
Andrea Chalupa:
Could you walk us through the different eras of the strongmen over the last 100 years? What global conditions gave rise to and defined the strongmen for each era, and, who were some of the most notable strongmen for each era?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
One of the projects of this book was to look at conditions that actually recur over a century—certain situations that, over and over, around the world, have given rise to this desire for authoritarian governance. I should say that I wanted to explore people who wrecked democracy, or damaged it. I didn't include communists, who inherited already, some forms of already closed societies. Except for Gaddafi, it's right-wing authoritarians. That's important.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
I divide the book into three eras; the Fascist era, the Cold War era, and then what I call New Authoritarians who start at the end of the Cold War—the 1990s and up to our day. One recurrence is that these figures find favor when there's been a lot of rapid change, or change experienced as too rapid in society, in social progress. It could be gender emancipation, and you can think of World War I when so many women had jobs that had been male jobs, and so many men felt their authority was threatened because they came back disabled, and all the death, you could think of that.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
It could be racial emancipation. America fit the bill after eight years of the presidency of Barack Obama, and many racists here thought he should never have been in power in the first place. It could be worker rights, it could be the threat of socialism, and it could be secularization, also.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
These are changes which some have fought bitterly for and are overjoyed about, and changes that leave others angry and anxious. It is in those conditions when figures who promise to be saviors of society, who promise to turn the clock back in a sense, but also shake everything up, these are the strongmen figures. It's very interesting, as they come on the political scene—and sometimes they're from outside of politics—but all of them are very skilled in mass communication. They know how to relate to audiences. They know how to be whatever the culture needs them to be at that time to assuage anxieties over demographic change, over emancipation, as I've said before.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
This is quite extraordinary. Even in situations of military coups, where nobody's running for office—there's the coup, and you can go to school in a democracy in the morning, or go off to work, and then by the time you come home it's no longer a democracy—there still has to be this turmoil in society as a result of changes that some view as apocalyptic, the apocalypse will come, so that's how you get this demand, this appetite, for the savior figure.
Sarah Kendzior:
Everything you've just recited is basically the textbook rise of dictatorships that we have all witnessed firsthand under Trump.; the destabilization of society, the rise of mass media, propaganda, repetition, which he obviously employed very well through digital media. Why do you think it was so difficult for Americans to believe that Trump was an aspiring dictator when he fit the bill?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yeah, that's an excellent question. One thing you see, if you take the big step back, is that these figures always force, in the aftermath—because they're all destructive, they cause mass death, most of them—they force nations to reckon with their cherished ideas about national identity. One of the myths about America was that "it can't happen here." That we're the land of freedom, our democracy is so old, which of course is an idea that doesn't exactly take into account that only in the 1960s with the Voting Rights Act and civil rights could everybody vote. People didn’t...their frame was resolutely that America's a place of democracy.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
There's also the fact that we never had an experience of national dictatorship. We never had foreign occupation. Although, the South under slavery, you could definitely call that a form of authoritarian governance. But nationally, we never had that experience, so many people didn't see the signs because they didn't know what they were like, and we don't teach in school. Sometimes, as I remember happening to me, by the time we got to World War II, there wasn't any more time... The class was over. It was time for summer, and we never quite got to Hitler and Mussolini properly, so people aren't taught about it enough.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Our cherished idea that there's American exceptionalism, although the true American exceptionalism is our gun policy where 500 million guns in private hands and arsenals, that's the true American exceptionalism. Then, I think people, even those who knew better, they didn't want to admit what they saw because then it might force them to do something about it. This is especially important with elites, because another thing that happens over and over again is conservative elites will back these extremist figures and bring them into the mainstream, thinking they can control them or use them.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Strongmen and men like Trump, who are totally amoral and transactional—and your work, Sarah, has shown that so well—they will let themselves be "used," but the joke is that, then, they end up leading those elites, forcing them to ever more extreme positions. Or, they legitimize all the extremism that's already been there, and that's what Trump did.
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Sarah Kendzior:
I'm just curious what your experience was like writing this book in the last couple years of the Trump Administration, as the situation became more and more dire but you also finally kind of started to see those elites, and also the general public, realizing that America's not at all immune to autocracy, that no country is. What was the reaction like to your predictions and to your analysis in the book, when it did come out?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
I mean, at the beginning, I was publishing, I did some things in The Atlantic, and some things at CNN. I have to say, CNN, they published all of my early forecasts about Trump following the authoritarian playbook, and even a piece that scared me to write, that I did right after, I think it was February 1st, 2017. The title was ‘Trump and Bannon's Coup in the Making’.
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh my God.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
It was in the wake of the ban on travel for Muslim countries, which I saw as a shock event, an authoritarian shock event. Because authoritarians, they want to keep you uncertain, frightened, living with this low buzz of anxiety, or terror if you're a targeted group. This is the upheaval I was talking about. On the one hand, they say they're going to be law and order, and they're going to restrain those groups who racists think shouldn't be having so much power. But, they also create chaos, and they thrive on chaos, and that's what... this was happening right after Trump came to power.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
I wrote this piece, saying that they would be following this... They would strike at the state, talking about how Bannon wants to destroy the administrative state. I got so frightened because I saw I was channeling to some kind of deep truth of things that would happen. I am sure both of you have had this sensation, which is unusual, that I had to stop and I went and did yoga, and I came back and I finished the piece.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
There was a lot of hate mail, and people thought I was just a complete... It was more that they couldn't quite grasp the frame that I was using. I know this has happened with both of you. It's been very difficult, still to this day, to get people to stop using a democratic frame of reference to analyze Donald Trump and his presidency. Instead, Donald Trump never had any goal of governing as a democrat with a small D. His goals were different, his goals were authoritarian goals.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Sarah, your work has pointed this out very well. He wanted to make money for Trump Organization. He wanted to build his personality cult to keep people loyal to him. He wanted to spread extremism because this type of ruler needs us to be polarized, and all of this corruption. Again, right now, we see he's telling people to not give money to the GOP, to give money to him, so this is continuing the grifting.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
There was an unpreparedness to grasp that there was a completely different framework of governance, and that everybody around them—and Sarah's book really showed this—he had people around him, like Bannon, like Roger Stone and others, with decades of experience in authoritarian politics and psychological warfare. So, besides hostility to my early pieces, there was incomprehension, I would say.
Sarah Kendzior:
Since Trump is such a departure, I guess for what Americans assume their governance is like, although I've noticed Black Americans, Native Americans, were not particularly surprised by this turn of events. I'm just curious, how do you think Trump compares to other strongmen of the past century? Who was he most like? Or, is there anybody who really compares? Is this a specifically American kind of aspiring authoritarianism?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yeah, that's such an interesting question. In some ways, he's very American. When I was talking about how these figures force us to look at ourselves in the mirror, and that's also why many people don't want to do that, not only individually but as a culture, Trump channels this—it's not limited to America, but it's really part of the American dream—he channels this idea of the obsession with celebrity and fame, the idea of the self-made man, because of course he was not a self-made man, he had so much help from his father, but he peddled himself as a self-made man.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
There's that, that anybody can make good in America, and that fame is all that matters. Glamor, and a particular kind of glamor of male lawlessness, which also this is typical of all authoritarians—Bolsonaro, Duterte, Putin—but Trump also channeled, in a way, these very classic American narratives like the Western. In fact, when he said, and this was the huge red flag moment, January 2016, he comes out, like, who does this? No democrats do this, small D: “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and I wouldn't lose any followers."
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
I thought immediately, and I don't think I ever published this because it would seem too strange to people, it's the Western because Fifth Avenue, that's his turf. Westerns are about the shootout and you have your turf, and this is what he was... Why did he say Fifth Avenue? He channels these... He knows exactly because of his experience marketing and all that, he knows exactly how to channel these heroic male archetypes, and it works.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Now, the other part of the question, though—and Sarah, you've been one of the only ones who has gotten this because of your work on post-communists—the whole debate of whether Trump is a fascist, right? That's part of the answer to your question. There's no doubt that Trump takes things that were pioneered by fascism. In fact, the whole playbook that my... The corruption, the turning public office into private profit, of course, he also channels neo Nazi. He's got a lot of things that come from fascism, but his aims are different than fascism, and you've pointed this out, Sarah, very well. He's not a territorial expansionist. Fascists were way more corrupt than we know. It's just that, for example, the research on Mussolini's corruption is kind of in its infancy, actually.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
But he wants to just... How do you put it, Sarah? Sell-
Sarah Kendzior:
Strip the country down and sell it for parts.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Sell it for parts. Yeah, and convert everything into a private money making enterprise for him and his cronies. Fascists did this. Again, we need to know more about how they did this, but his goals are a little bit different. They're much closer to what becomes in Putin's Russia a kleptocracy, or Erdoğan. Things are way more advanced in those countries where the state is a predator. Trump wouldn't have gotten away with... He just doesn't have that kind of control.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
But that's another thing, that all these guys start somewhere. When people say, "Oh, how could you be an authoritarian? It's an open society." Well, those countries, you know, Putin's been there for 20 years, Orban has been in Hungary for 10 years. Again, we go back to this blindness and not wanting to see Trump as anything but incompetent and kind of a loser.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's a shame that Stalin gets left out, and the communists get left out of your book. So, I have to correct what I said earlier about your book being a one stop shop, because there is a large swath of mass death—state-engineered mass death—that is missing from the story. I would say your book, along with Tim Snyder's, his work, would be more of a complete picture of what we've been dealing with for the last 100 years plus. I did feel the absence of Stalin, given my own work, and what my family has been through. That was one hole in the larger story.
Andrea Chalupa:
But I do think you present a really sharp focus on gaslighting, which is obviously something we cover a lot in the show. How do aspiring strongmen use gaslighting in the rise to power, and what are some examples?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
One of the things that people can't grasp while it's happening is that they start testing out the tools of rule, including gaslighting and propaganda techniques, while they're running for office. Again, military coups are different, nobody runs for office, but all the others, the Fascist era and our era, generally they're running for office. They're in public making connections, showing their platforms.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
One of the things they must do from the very start is discredit anybody who could harm them because they are corrupt. Many strongmen already are under investigation or have a criminal record. So, the public doesn't think about that enough. Like, Mussolini, Hitler had criminal records. Mussolini was a total thug. Putin, Trump and Berlusconi-
Andrea Chalupa:
And Stalin was a thug as well.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yeah. They have to turn the public against the press. That's a very, very important priority. They're doing that because that way, and Trump eventually told Lesley Stahl, he came out and said it a few years into his presidency, that he wanted to discredit the press, so nobody would believe what they said. That's very important in the foundation of gaslighting because you have to discredit any alternative stories.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
The other is elevating yourself through personality cult as the arbiter of reality. Mussolini's slogan was “Mussolini is always right”, and it was all over. It was on buildings, it was on posters. You were inculcated with this belief. So there's a whole apparatus of collaboration that goes into this, where religious institutions start buying into this myth for their own reasons, like the evangelicals, they start saying, “Yes, Trump is here”, or plug in the name of the ruler, “he's ruling by divine mandate” and this gives everything he says an aura of infallibility, or credibility, for sure.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
The point of the book is to show how these tactics are all interrelated, that the propaganda has to work with elite collaboration. It also works with corruption, it also works with violence, because eventually you threaten or you repress, you kill, alternative voices. All of those things have to be in place for the gaslighting that is typical of leaders like Trump to work.
Sarah Kendzior:
Why do elites support strongmen figures, Trump or otherwise?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Often, they see very well—they're politicians, but this also applies to business elites, financial elites, religious—they see very well that this is an amoral transactional individual. They realize that he will gladly do their bidding and deliver for them if they back him and give him credibility, which is an agreement to cover up his crimes, go along with whatever he does, and inevitably it gets more and more extreme.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
So, one of the tragedies though, is that sometimes they think that he will only go so far and they underestimate the destructiveness of the personality. They don't mind the amoral transactionalism, but they don't understand the destructiveness and the chaos. Time and time again—it's really fascinating, it takes us into the realm of psychology—they have gotten screwed over.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Often, the people who are most important at the beginning who bring these guys into the system are just cast aside. It's a use and discard policy that these men have, because they're narcissists. Again, they're amoral. I could fill a whole page with the names of individuals from the elites who enabled these men early on when they most needed it, and then got cast aside.
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, who are some examples?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
One of the earliest ones that started it all was Giovanni Giolitti, who had been prime minister many times in Italy of... It was called The Liberals, but it's a conservative party. He and others liked the fact that Trump... Trump, hello—that Mussolini was going to tame the leftists, because Mussolini had already been through squadrism, killing thousands of leftists.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
He thought that he could be used, so he decided to bring Mussolini into a coalition government. Without him—he brought him into his block, like his voting bloc—the fascists had only 1% of the vote. I have the exact figure in my book. They were going nowhere electorally until Giolitti brought him in. Then, eventually, the king appoints Mussolini with the approval of all these elites to become prime minister, and the rest, we know what happened, he eventually declared dictatorship.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
When Giolitti died, the king and Mussolini didn't come to his funeral, because he'd already been useful to him. Another example, which is, in a way, even more fascinating, because this same dynamic can happen even when there's a coup. You, perhaps, didn't know it was coming. There, in Chile, when Pinochet took over, the Christian Democrats were the kind of conservative elites. Some of them also thought it wasn't a bad thing for the Junta to come in, because they would restore order. Pinochet had overthrown the socialist president, Allende, and had him killed. He committed suicide, but he was killed. So, it was overturning a leftist government.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
The former president of Chile, who was the leading Christian Democrat, Eduardo Frei Montalva, actually, right after the coup, he said, "Well, we can give them our support, because they're saying, in six months, they're going to return power to democracy." Of course, this was a severe underestimation of how these things work and who Pinochet was, and later Montalva started to speak out about the dictatorship. In 1982, he went into the hospital for a routine procedure, and he never came out. He was poisoned. It took his family all the way until last year to prove that he had been poisoned, to get the documents released.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
So, this syndrome of being used and discarded, and backing can happen even when they're not running for office. It's a misapprehension of who we're dealing with, and this happened with Trump in America. People did not assess who they were dealing with. It was only people who had studied autocrats, like us, who figured it out.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Do you think that American elites, particularly in the Republican Party, have learned their lesson with Trump? Because a lot of them have been used, discarded, had their careers implode, ended up with prison sentences, et cetera, as a result of their association with him, yet he continues to bring people into his fold. What are your thoughts about that?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
No, it's very tragic because, In particular, they had an out after January 6th, and the impeachment proceedings, the second impeachment proceedings. This was a crossroads for the GOP, and they decided to remain faithful to him, even backing a coup attempt that cost the lives of many people and it legitimated violence in a way that had been going on but it took it to a different level. So, they haven't learned anything and nor has the media who continue to have election deniers on and give them primetime space on the media. These media elites haven't learned anything either.
Sarah Kendzior:
Why do you think they're acting against what's ultimately their own self interest? For example, if Trump or any other aspiring American autocrat is to return in 2024, we're going to end up with a situation in which freedom of the press, free media, free speech, et cetera is minimized. So, they're working against themselves. What do you make of the media's role in propping up these individuals when, at the least, it seems to go against their own self-interest?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
It's hard to fully understand it, other than going back to the idea that it's been very difficult for people to want to give up their ways of doing things and their models of viewing the relation of politics and the media, because what they're doing only works in a democratic model, not when the people are... Because politicians have always told lies, they've always had their party lines. There have been moments when party discipline has been imposed, but not like this.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
They're seemingly unable to change the frame to consider what is going on, which is, at this point, it's a very concerted effort to erode democracy. Because, make no mistake, Trump left—all the things he did after he lost the election, as well as what he did before—have left a roadmap of how to make the US into what some people call an electoral autocracy, where you have elections, but they are robbed of all significance because of fraud, because of redistricting, voter suppression. The big story right now is all these laws introduced to make voting more difficult.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
So the media, also because these guys and women still get... They help ratings. They're wedded to these models of profit. They're wedded to these models of coverage that are bipartisan, and they're not realizing that we're not really in a bipartisan situation because one party is no longer a Democrat party. The GOP has become a far-right party. It has more than one foot in the realm of authoritarianism at this point.
Andrea Chalupa:
In 2016, Susan Sarandon famously said that Trump getting elected would bring the revolution faster. I heard this privately from people on the left saying Trump should become president and burn it all down. We saw this as well, people taking out their anger and helplessness out at the ballot box, people on the left even admitting to voting for Trump, and of course, Brexit is a famous case of this. People just went to the ballot box on Brexit and just bashed something.
Andrea Chalupa:
What message do you have for voters who take this anger out on the ballot box and this burn it down mentality, given...I've studied corruption in Ukraine and post-Soviet states, and once you're in that black hole, once you've burned it all down, it's very hard to come back out of that.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
You could call it a political immaturity or an ignorance of history and current events in examples like the one you cite, not understanding that using voting in this manner is ultimately harming themselves. It's very interesting how the coronavirus unfolded because that's an example where you saw that the toll of corrupt governance, of having a leader who truly didn't care if you lived or died. I started saying that in March, last March, a year ago, and people would get very upset because it was too blunt.
Sarah Kendzior:
I had same reaction, but-
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yeah, you did. But that's how it is. They don't care if you live or die, they just want to fleece you and use you. The fact that people didn't get that when their own loved ones were dying—because it's very interesting the history of autocracy, and resistance. When I've tracked in the book, I wanted to track what makes personality cults start to fragment and dissolve. What does it take? And in the fascist cases, and these were one-party states, no alternative voices for many years, it took being bombed. It took citizens being bombed by the allies in their own homes, which then were destroyed. It took that for them to start losing their fear and start, in Italy, particularly, resisting, to start insulting publicly the Duce and the fuhrer because they didn't care anymore.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Knowing that, I thought that coronavirus, and I am an optimist on human nature, although, I understand how... I don't expect too much from the leaders of Trump's type, but it was very interesting and sad to me that people did not, with death all around them, they could not distance themselves from the cult of Trump and his GOP enablers. Up to this day, where there's so many videos on social media of people who are trying not to wear masks and the burning of the masks, the bonfire burning masks with children throwing masks into the fire recently, is very sad.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, one thing that this makes me think of is in the beginning of our conversation, we discussed World War I and the Spanish flu and this feeling of people becoming desensitized to mass death, being desensitized to killing. Of course, today, with social media, we're bombarded with images of death, statistics of death, and with people being callous and cruel towards death and dying.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's often a precondition to fascist rise. We've already endured that over the last few years. What do you see coming ahead, in part as a result of the corona pandemic, and just generally speaking, because I'm with you, not so optimistic?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Well, it's a very interesting moment, because on the one hand, speaking of elite projects, there is... I could see a design coming to make Biden's governance feel very incapable, because Trump was trying to sabotage the Biden administration by not taking care of corona, no economic relief, all of this. This would repeat things that have happened in the past, including before the coup in Chile, where democratic governance looks so unstable, and this is where some national security experts thinks there will be more terrorism attempts and sporadic violence, that increases the appetite of the voters for law and order governance, and perhaps a Trump return or somebody else.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
That could be going on. On the other hand, we have lived through—and this is true globally—an experience of transformative mass protest in the Black Lives Matter protests that were multiracial, multi-generational. There are these energies that even withstood the pandemic. And we did vote him out. We did something very unusual in the history of authoritarianism. We interrupted a process of authoritarian capture by voting him out, against all odds.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Part of the psychological warfare the GOP is waging is that we haven't had time to celebrate that, to feel resolute because of that, to feel cheered, because autocrats want us to be demoralized and abject, and losing faith in our ability to affect change. The slogan, for me, of the Trump way of seeing life is when he said, “it is what it is” when people told him about the latest mass death statistics. “It is what it is.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
I'm going to write a piece about this because it encapsulates the hopelessness that authoritarians like Trump want to create in us. It is what it is, is a flat horizon. Don't try anything because it won't work. Nothing can be changed. You just submit and you obey, right? So, voting him out was a refutation of this entire philosophy, but he's left things in such a way to create the conditions for a return.
Sarah Kendzior:
What do you think about the Biden administration's reaction, or platform, so far in terms of countering this? Because I'm not making a comparison in the sense of, you know, their character or even their goals, but Biden did say, as one of his campaign promises, "Nothing fundamentally will change." Then, of course, he did promote and create policies that are changing things. That's why we have a mass vaccination program going on, among other things, but there still is this sense with Biden of not wanting to fundamentally alter broken institutions, say the filibuster, how the Senate or the supreme court are comprised, which actually threaten the stability of our democracy, the fact that these institutions are broken are what allowed Trump in part to come in. How do you reconcile those two tendencies; nothing will change versus it is what it is?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
I think it's very interesting, because there is a certain logic to what Biden is doing where he has very purposefully tried to lower the temperature of feverish polarization, of the hatred. He's tried to be a kind of holding environment you could say, and work, and pass things like this huge stimulus package and all that's going on with taking care of coronavirus.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
I was very interested to see the ads that the administration was releasing for what they call the American Rescue Plan, because I'm an analyst of images. These ads consciously channeled a kind of Great Depression imagery. They were old fashioned in their fonts, in their colors, and that is consistent with this message of trying to just be a stable force, a decent stable force in American society.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Making that choice means you're not going to be the one who's going to undertake drastic reforms that perhaps are needed. I would think that right now the country's in a triple emergency. There's this political emergency of extremism, there's economic emergency that millions are homeless and suffering because of coronavirus fallout, and a health crisis. We're still in the middle of mass death. So, a second term of Democrats would be needed to do that kind of thing once there's a little more confidence and stability.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, definitely. In your book, I want to start by saying, the torture section, which is horrific, you acclimate us to the rise of the strongmen and all the tools from gaslighting and virility and patriarchy that they use to capture a state. Then once they're in and they're consolidating power, the inner sadist, the narcissist, is fully unleashed.
Andrea Chalupa:
I didn't know the full extent of the horror of Gaddafi, for instance. Gaddafi turned Libya into his own personal sex dungeon. He built a sex dungeon on a university campus because he liked to snatch victims from the student campus. Then Pinochet, using Nazis, the Nazis that fled to Chile and found a second life being Pinochet's torturers, and all those horrific stories of how they used rape and spiders and dogs for the sexual, sadist torture against Pinochet's opposition in Chile.
Andrea Chalupa:
What you describe is just a small glimpse of the larger torture that the rest of the population was trapped under with the regular chaos, the gaslighting, and the self-censorship, and the internal control that the dictator would impose on his captives. You have records of people's dreams under Hitler. People have to understand how, yes, there's always going to be centers of sadism within the dictatorship where people are absolutely being dehumanized in the most hellish way imaginable. But the larger population itself is being tortured in a psychological way, where even their personal life is captured by the strongman. Could you speak a little bit about that?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. I've received a number of messages where people, they couldn't read that chapter, and I understand that. But the kind of bigger principle behind it is, I don't use the word hoarders in the book, but strongmen are personalities who are hoarders and too much is never enough. Through their personal actions and their policies, their MO is plunder: use and discard, or use and keep for themself if it's riches. So, they plunder bodies, they plunder assets, they plunder businesses, they plunder minds (which is propaganda).
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
In their personal practice of hoarding wealth, of having pipelines for bodies, and it's very important in the virility chapter, I try and link this to corruption, to propaganda, to see how they're interrelated. Many of these personalities found ways in their lives to have a pipeline for bodies. What's interesting is Berlusconi and Trump, before they came to office, they were drawn to work in Berlusconi-owned TV networks.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Trump invested in modeling agencies and Miss Universe. This gives this personality type not only they're making money in corrupt ways for riches, but they have—that's why I use the word pipeline—they have, through their businesses, they have opportunities to plunder bodies, to have inexhaustible streams of bodies, women they can leverage.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
The examples of dictators are interesting because when a dictator consolidates his power, he can use the instruments of government, the resources of government, to satisfy his mania for sex, for riches. So, the examples of Mussolini and Gaddafi—and Gaddafi was the most extreme because he actually had sex dungeons and he kept them captive.
Andrea Chalupa:
And he tortured people before raping them, and then he would force them to be his actual servants in the kitchen, in the dining room, serving heads the state that would come to visit. Gaddafi's whole psychology was completely demented.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
He was completely demented but I wanted to point out the logic behind it, and unfortunately, I had to live in the heads of these people for two years to understand the logic because the whole sex captives of Gaddafi, it's not talked about much because of shame, because of the reasons that often people don't talk about rape, and people don't want to believe it. But it's very important to understand the logic of autocracy that Gaddafi used his secret police to scout for women and also his propaganda opportunities. When he went to make speeches at universities, he would scout women. That's why he had at University of Tripoli, to have his instant gratification, he had a sex dungeon built under the University of Tripoli.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
His main one was in his residence, in his huge compound. But it's all part of the same... Governance becomes a way to satisfy your desires; more and more wealth, more and more humiliation of others, more and more violence, and all the forms that takes of which rape and torture is among them.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
It was very difficult to write, especially as a woman, but I felt it was a way of honoring the victims and helping people to understand this logic. It’s not separate. You can't separate these things. Of course, when I got to Trump, nowadays, you don't keep people captive necessarily, but think about Jeffrey Epstein. Sometimes in interviews I say it’s as though Jeffrey Epstein were the head of state, and his scouts and his... Berlusconi—again, you don't keep people captive today—but Berlusconi used his TV recruiters, he owned a huge publicity firm. He used all these people to scout, and some of the women in Berlusconi's case, they were helped in their careers, and some of them went into Parliament after attending his sex parties.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Abuse of governmental office, abuse of power is at the center. The book is showing that the psychology and the dynamics don't change much. The outcome differs hugely from the years of dictatorship to what happens today, where dictatorships are less common.
Andrea Chalupa:
On that thread, why is virility important to the strongmen? And the oppression of women and LGBTQ people was also a huge weapon. Like, patriarchy being a huge weapon of the consolidation of power by the strongman. Why is that so common among all the strongmen of the last century plus?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yeah, I have a line in the book where I say “Women have been as much the strongmen's enemy as journalists and prosecutors'', and the oppression of women and LGBTQ people is a throughline. To go back to your comment on why there's no Stalin or communists, I wanted to show this through line from the fascist to right-wing authoritarians to what goes on with Bolsonaro and Trump, and homophobia and misogyny are part of that. Obviously, they exist on the left too, but I wanted to show this continuance of rhetoric.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
So, I chose to make this kind of genealogy in my book. The virility is really important because it's too easy for us just to laugh at Putin, who strips his shirt off, shows his pecs, or Trump with his ridiculous retweeting. He tweeted—it wasn't even a retweet—he tweeted a picture of his face photoshopped onto Sylvester Stallone's body in Rocky III. That's absurd, right? And we can laugh at it, but it's deadly serious, because virility, it's part of their personality cults but it's also key to their corruption. Because getting away with it is at the essence of authoritarian rule. Having impunity, everybody around you can go to jail, but the leader cannot.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
This too is virility, the man who gets away with it, and also the man who has the power to threaten and intimidate, but nobody can intimidate him. Americans have seen this play out very well with all the things that went on, and Trump is still punishing fellow GOP people for those who voted to impeach him, but nobody threatens him in the GOP. Everybody goes and kisses his ring now in Mar a Lago. Authoritarian party dynamics are also part of this virility.
Andrea Chalupa:
Obviously, leaving out the communists though, I would say Stalin's several genocides were against women, men, children, everybody. A lot of the left, especially in the West, was blinded by this idea of progress, especially for women. Meanwhile, Stalin was mass murdering everybody.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yes, that's very key, and that's why part of this mass murder didn't come out for so long, and your work has helped to bring that to public consciousness.
Sarah Kendzior:
A lot of what you're describing just simply sounds like the mafia. As we’ve said on this show many times about the Trump administration, this is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as government, and there are people within that system—like who you brought up, like Jeffrey Epstein—who seem more central to it than our actual elected officials.
Sarah Kendzior:
We see this dynamic play out not just in the United States, but with Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UK. I mean, it's a global phenomenon. What do you make of this, especially versus the fascist dictatorships of the past?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
What you have in places like Putin—which is a kleptocracy, Putin's Russia—by now, it's a seamless blending of the legitimate and illegitimate and, even more, the methods of criminal activity used, they have become normalized. People don't know enough that Putin has jailed thousands and thousands of businesspeople. If your business is too profitable, even a smaller business has too much potential, it will be preyed upon. It's called predation, as in predator.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Erdoğan has seized the equivalent of $32 billion of schools, of assets, of businesses. These are predators. Here we go back to the predation and the hoarding of the discussion before. All authoritarians legalize lawlessness. They institutionalize and glorify lawlessness—going back to the virility also. Trump brought this to new levels, and it makes sense because the people around him had been involved in places like Ukraine.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Think of Mike Flynn, who was working for Erdoğan at the same time he was working for Trump. Sarah, the formulation of the transnational crime syndicate is so important because it's also hard for many Americans to think of governance in those terms. They might know about mafia methods, but the scope of this—the transnational scope—can be difficult to grasp.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
One easy way in that I want to write more about is to unpack and expose the hypocrisy of the whole "anti-global”—I'm doing air quotes that you can't see—rhetoric which Trump and others (that's the populist part) used very effectively. America First, no globalists, and in Hungary, it's linked everywhere. It's linked to anti-Semitism. No one is more of a globalist than Trump. His whole business model was licensing his name and enterprises abroad.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Well into the presidency, he and Ivanka were picking up Chinese trademarks. This is operative everywhere. Think of Putin. He's constantly talking about anti-globalist and Russian identity and storing his illicit money in offshore finance networks, which are run globally. So I think we need to do way more to expose this hypocrisy as part of exposing how these transnational crime methods have been able to infiltrate more and more into American governance.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think what was really interesting is the history of the rise of the Nazis that you cover in your book and how Hitler, like Trump, ruled through chaos. And he ruled through essentially paying people off. His top guys in the infrastructure of the Nazi Party got to have their own little fiefdoms and enrich themselves and steal from the state and steal from their victims, of course, plundering the Jewish communities that they would then destroy and exterminate. As part of this, to desensitize or bribe the broader German public into pulling them into this crime, the Nazis passed legislation that was beneficial to the broader German person.
Andrea Chalupa:
Trump, with his tax cuts for the rich and his rolling back of regulation, that was what a lot of these independent voters and Republican voters were standing on, even though Trump went straight to the Muslim ban, went straight to separating families at the border with zero plan on how to reunite them. There were sex abuse reports coming out from the crisis on the border and children dying on result of their policy on the border. Could you talk a little bit about the strongman's bribing of the broader public in order to help push through ethnic cleansing, essentially?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yeah, that's an important point. All of the other tools of rule are used to make violence—whatever form it's going to take—more acceptable and thinkable. I was very struck because I didn't know this before I did the research for the book, that in 1933 and again in 1938, which were like flashpoint moments in Nazism. 1938, the Anschluss, Kristallnacht, Hitler passed debt eradication measures for Germans. 1933, we're still in the depression.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
So as he's persecuting leftists and sending thousands to camps and starts persecuting Jews and others, he is making things better by eradicating debt for Germans who are Aryan. Again, he does this in 1938. That seems to encapsulate the way that it's not only through propaganda and rituals and rallies that the fascists were the first to—along with the communists—were the first to cement as a way of making people feel included. These rituals are very important, and Trump branded with the MAGA hats, very, very important to having tribalism. They actively are encouraged through buyouts and buy offs and bribes, to be complicit, to quell their conscience that others are being persecuted, because the strongman makes it easier because of what he's giving out.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
This dynamic is crucial to understanding authoritarianism. Sometimes when we only focus on propaganda, it's not practical enough. It's not all about controlling minds, it's giving people things so that they will feel it's worth it to participate in the corruption and in the violence. That's why I think the big message of my book is to look at how these tools interact, and it's also why I structured the book the way I did. It would have been way easier to do it by person, like traditional biographies, everything Mussolini, everything Hitler. But I did it, instead, each tool has its own chapter and each one goes over 100 years.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
So you can see how this practice of buying out changed from the fascists, who collaborated, who said they were going to get rid of the mafia, but then it turned out the fascist party was using and collaborating with the mafia and using its methods. You can see how that started and what's going on 100 years later.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, one thing that I want to just ask you about is it's now been two months since we had a violent attempted coup on the Capitol resulting in death. The people at the top, the people in this transnational mafia cohort that Trump surrounds himself with, like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, et cetera, are, to my knowledge, not even being investigated and certainly haven't been prosecuted. When you get into this realm of incentives or leverage, on whose side should elites be if they want to retain power, on whose side will the public be drawn to in terms of a strongman figure, how did this attempted coup change our political life, change our perception of our future? What are your thoughts on how things are going so far?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
It's very upsetting, and it's a total disaster from a democracy point of view, and has been played very, very well by the instigators who are inside our institutions. This early idea that they were a mob, Mitch McConnell kept calling them a mob, well, maybe a mob, but the mob is them. Because the more that comes out about it, how many donors and Republican officials.... It's an inside job and it was planned way early. It was not some spontaneous thing with just the rally.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
January 6 really encapsulates so many things about these authoritarian dynamics. For example, it was very important that when Trump had the rally, he wasn't just inciting violence, and logically that became the focus because of the impeachment process, but he told them he loved them. He said, "I love you, you're special, our journey is beginning." This elevation of the worst criminal elements in society, this elevation of the outside, people who were "The Forgotten." He's been doing this for five years, if you count his campaign. This was like the culmination.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
January 6 was a rescue operation. It reminded me of early fascism, a rescue operation of the leader. They were going to disrupt the democratic process and give him what he rightfully deserved by interrupting the certification.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
The fact that the GOP has been so tight in defending this and in trying to rewrite history through this very dangerous narrative that tries to whitewash the violence—and some of them initially whitewashed the violence, and now it's accepted—and what it is, every single time a GOP official goes on television, they are telling you that the GOP has decided that violence is an acceptable way to solve the problem of staying in power. I'm going to repeat that because it's so important: violence is an acceptable way to the problem of staying in power.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
What we're going to see in the next years, and this is why, with the voter suppression, there's a real emergency in the GOP because they can't perhaps win legally, but they've got to stay in power. So, they already... Voter suppression has a long, long history, as you know, and all the other redistricting, all the other things they do. But what was added is violence. It's an insurrection that kills people. It didn't work this time, but it was very successful as a recruiting tool, especially since the GOP has thrown its weight behind it. They had this with the crossroads. They had a real crossroads and they could have gone the other direction, and they chose this direction. It spells nothing good for democracy in the future.
Sarah Kendzior:
I remember on the day that Biden was proclaimed the winner by mass media and people were out celebrating in the streets, you released videos on Twitter in a warning to not prematurely celebrate and that bad things are coming down the road. What are your warnings for the future now?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
That as exhausted as we are, this is the time to double down, because the next years, because of all we've been talking about, basically—this goes with your gaslighting theme—elections become just another piece of information that can be denied, or fabricated through fraud and replaced with the reality you need to stay in office.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
So the lessons of this election season through January 6 are the violence lesson that we said before, and the idea that elections can be just something else you engage in disinformation around. Once that's true, and now they're doing all the legislation at the state levels, they're trying to get this legislation through, and they're also purging officials. The GOP is purging officials so that they never have somebody like the Georgia Secretary of State there again, because just a few people made a big difference this time. They're learning from this. The task is, are Democrats learning? We have to have a very united front and democracy protection has to be at the very top of priorities or we will find ourselves in 2024 with a bad outcome, because these people are not going away.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
When Trump lost and then even when he finally left on January 20th, even people who had been pretty smart about their critiques of him, some of them said, "Oh, he's gone. That's it. He's just going to fade away." You still hear that. I don't see that happening. I would love to be wrong, as always.
Sarah Kendzior:
[laughs] We all would. That's the uniting theme of this show.
Andrea Chalupa:
But even if he did go away, the culture he's established has a lot of competing heirs to take his place.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Yes, he's the figurehead in some ways, and he's really interested in making money, and that's what he's most interested in right now. That's why he's trying to get people to donate just to him. Governance has always been just a means to this corrupt end, that you both have also written about. The damage that's been done by legalizing extremism, glorifying extremism, and by glorifying lawlessness in ways that translate into a total scorn for our system... Democracy was an honor system, and they have a total scorn for this.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
So, in the future, they won't really care if they didn't win the election, they'll try and stay in power anyway. In that, they will be like 21st century authoritarians in other countries. That's an appropriately pessimist-
Sarah Kendzior:
[laugh] Yes. Another classic Gaslit Nation close out there. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Definitely want to do this again, and everyone should go and get Ruth's book, Strongmen.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Thank you, it's been great.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
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