Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Overview

What modern authoritarian leaders have in common (and how they can be stopped).

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin—enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future.

For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They promise law and order, then legitimize lawbreaking by financial, sexual, and other predators.

They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power.

Vladimir Putin and Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocracies, Augusto Pinochet’s torture sites, Benito Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi’s systems of sexual exploitation, and Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump’s relentless misinformation: all show how authoritarian rule, far from ensuring stability, is marked by destructive chaos.

No other type of leader is so transparent about prioritizing self-interest over the public good. As one country after another has discovered, the strongman is at his worst when true guidance is most needed by his country.

Recounting the acts of solidarity and dignity that have undone strongmen over the past 100 years, Ben-Ghiat makes vividly clear that only by seeing the strongman for what he is—and by valuing one another as he is unable to do—can we stop him, now and in the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393868418
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	8,754
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is an internationally acclaimed historian, speaker, and political commentator for the Atlantic, CNN, the Washington Post, and other publications. She is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Protagonists xiii

Note on Terms and Language xvii

Introduction 1

Part I Getting to Power

1 Fascist Takeovers 19

2 Military Coups 35

3 New Authoritarian Ascents 48

Part II Tools of Rule

4 A Greater Nation 65

5 Propaganda 91

6 Virility 119

7 Corruption 141

8 Violence 165

Part III Losing Power

9 Resistance 193

10 Endings 221

Conclusion 247

Epilogue to the Paperback Edition 263

Abbreviations 273

Notes 275

Selected Bibliography 329

Index 351

Editorial Reviews

"Rich in anecdote.…Ms. Ben-Ghiat is at her most persuasive when she writes of the importance of the strongman’s cult of personality."

Wall Street Journal - Tunku Varadarajan

"For the reader inured by the drip-drip-drip of stories of brazen corruption over the course of years, it is bracing to see a half-decade’s worth of reporting so carefully distilled.…Ben-Ghiat does not shy away from revealing America’s role in enabling dictatorships around the world.…It’s a chilling current through the book and one that pricks the conscience of a reader."

Talia Lavin

"Ruth Ben-Ghiat delivers a superb examination of how close the US came to fascism—and how it has propped it up before."

Guardian - Charles Kaiser

"Ben-Ghiat teaches us about the leaders.…[She] cogently states that the secret of the strongman is that he needs the crowds much more than they need him."

New Republic - Federico Finchelstein

"Everyone who cares about American democracy should read this book."

Sarah Kendzior

"What separates this book from the many others that examine tyrants and tyranny—is the analysis that puts this phenomenon in perspective."

Boston Globe - David M. Shribman

10/05/2020

Historian Ben-Ghiat (Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema) examines in this incisive and richly detailed account the origin myths, power-grabbing tactics, and personality traits shared by the 20th century’s fascist dictators and today’s right-wing authoritarians. She analyzes how Italian rulers Benito Mussolini and Silvio Berlusconi, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, Libyan revolutionary Muammar Gaddafi, and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, among many other “strongmen,” seized and held on to power through political uprisings, military coups, and “antidemocratic tactics like fraud and voter suppression.” Ben-Ghiat compares Adolf Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland in 1938 to Putin’s annexation of the Ukraine in 2014; dissects how Mussolini, Gaddafi, and Mobutu Sese Seko, the ruler of Zaire, bolstered their power by vaunting their sexual virility; and details how “new authoritarians” including Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro use social media “to create the news they need to stay in office.” Throughout, Ben-Ghiat notes the similarities between President Trump and antidemocratic rulers of the past and present: “A nation that never endured dictatorship or foreign occupation now has firsthand experience of the authoritarian playbook.” It’s a persuasive case, though the decision to leave leftist strongmen largely out of her study leaves Ben-Ghiat open to charges of political bias. Still, this is a thought-provoking look at how authoritarianism has shape-shifted from WWII to today. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Ruth Ben-Ghiat…specializes in male menace."

The New Yorker - Jon Blitzer

"Simultaneously intimate and sweeping in scope, Strongmen brings us in close to dictators and would-be dictators across decades and continents. We are left with a disturbing look in the mirror. Throughout, Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s clear prose rings with a rhythm and cadence that today’s nonfiction too often lacks."

Sarah Chayes

"A surpassingly brilliant public intellectual."

Slate Trumpcast - Virginia Heffernan

"With a steady gaze and an eye for the telling detail, Ruth Ben-Ghiat delivers a timely analysis of how a certain kind of charisma delivers political disaster — and some valuable hints about how it can be resisted, and the virtues we will need to rebuild democracy."

Timothy Snyder

"Deep insight and a vigorous style…[A] brilliant contribution to the political psychology of democracy."

Joy Connolly

"Ben-Ghiat's portrayal of fascist-era tyrants, murderous Cold War dictators, and would-be tyrants in our own day gives us a gripping and illuminating picture of how strongmen have deployed violence, seduction, and corruption. History, she shows, offers clear lessons not only about how these regimes are built, but also how they must be opposed, and how they end."

Daniel Ziblatt

11/01/2020

Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Muammar Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump are representative of strongmen, according to Ben-Ghiat (history, Italian Studies, New York Univ.; Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema), as the author traces the evolution of the charismatic leader who specializes in using power for its sake as a way to obtain political control of a country. The narrative story begins with Mussolini and his rise to power post-World War I. In succeeding chapters, Ben-Ghiat explores the tactics and antics of other leaders, such as Hitler and Pinochet, as they use the existing political structure to garner power in their own right. Through extensive research in primary and secondary sources, Ben-Ghiat creates a sobering picture of how strong-willed men have been able to establish themselves as popular rulers, while undermining the very democratic structure within which they thrived. Ben-Ghiat's narrative is replete with examples of how authoritarian rulers came to power and how they maintain power; overall, the book represents a troubling portrayal of how mature modern democracies can be ultimately dominated by such strongmen. VERDICT A sober book, and one that we should all take seriously. Essential for all collections.—Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

Library Journal

2020-09-10
What does Donald Trump have in common with dictators like Hitler and Mussolini? A professor of history and Italian studies at NYU tallies the similarities.

This incisive study casts a wider geographic net than two recent books that have placed Trump on a continuum of authoritarian leaders: Géraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget, which set him in the context of rising far-right movements in Europe, and Eric Posner’s The Demagogue’s Playbook, which compared him to American tyrants. Ben-Ghiat shows how “strongmen” have undermined or destroyed democracy in three successive eras: the fascist takeovers (1919-1945) that gave rise to Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco; the military coups (1950-1990) that installed Gaddafi, Pinochet, and Sese Seko; and the elections (1990-present) that elevated Berlusconi, Erdogan, Putin, and Trump. Agreeing with the anthropologist Ernest Becker that it’s fear that makes people follow demagogues, Ben-Ghiat shows how modern strongmen have swayed the masses by exploiting three factors often cited by other scholars: violence, propaganda, and corruption. She also argues, more originally but less persuasively, that they flaunt a fourth trait, “virility,” manifested in acts such as Trump’s boasting of his sexual exploits to Access Hollywood and Putin’s posing shirtless for photos. This argument is her weakest partly because many nondespotic leaders have displayed a similar male bravado; shirtless photos of JFK and Reagan abound, and no U.S. president may have been more macho than big-game hunter Teddy Roosevelt. The author is on firmer ground when she shows how male leaders use “divide-and-rule” and other tactics to consolidate power, as Trump did in making states compete for medical equipment during the pandemic. Ben-Ghiat allows that women like Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi “may have had certain strongman traits,” but she excludes them from scrutiny because “none of them sought to destroy democracy.” Given that this book is at heart a horror story, no female leader will regret her own exclusion.

An intelligent if less than blazingly original study of modern authoritarian leaders.

Kirkus Reviews