Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.
The United States’ recently-held presidential election in November 2024 has thrown into question whether the United States of America will remain a democracy or go the way of dictatorship. As such, Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present will serve as a guidebook for navigating through this ongoing authoritarian turn in American politics. In examining the political tendencies, as well as dictatorships, of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Muammar Gaddafi, and Augusto Pinochet, among others, Strongmen answers the questions perplexing so many today: How do authoritarian governments take root? How are societies convinced that these illiberal political figures and movements are trustworthy and reliable? Ben-Ghiat’s study also brings to the fore stories of resistance, many based on personal interviews, that give hope and encouragement.
Ben-Ghiat submits that a common language is lacking to speak about twenty-first century authoritarianism, arguing that a “playbook” of tools and tactics used by authoritarians over the last century can be discerned. She elucidates the interconnected histories of these tools, especially violence and plunder, that are too rarely studies in a transnational and transhistorical context (p.7). Strongmen also adds to the discussion of authoritarianism with its focus on the strongman’s need to project virility; masculine display and male kinship are seen, here, as methods for exercising power, enabling corruption, and deploying the power of the State to target (and punish) political enemies, such as workers, women, and LGBTQ+ people.
In her introduction, Ben-Ghiat lays out the basic foundations of the authoritarian playbook: social anxieties lead to polarization, giving autocrats more appeal and an incentive to exacerbate existing sociopolitical tensions. Under the circumstances, Ben-Ghiat explains, the media is frequently vilified for allegedly circulating false information while the autocrat casts himself as the mouthpiece of truth. Shock events that lead to states of emergency are then used to consolidate power, silence opposition, and give license to those already in power to do what democracy always, and rightfully, kept them from doing. Outlined here in the book’s opening chapter, the “authoritarian playbook” serves as the methodological backdrop for the rest of the study.
In Part I: “Getting to Power,” Ben-Ghiat demonstrates how autocrats take power, and gives an overview of the originators of fascism and authoritarianism: Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco. The advent of the modern military coup and new authoritarian strategies are also discussed. Ben-Ghiat details the authoritarian networking of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign as an example of this. Henry Kissinger, also a Putin adviser, provided introductions to Chinese premier Xi Jinping and other leaders Trump admired, although not for ideological reasons. Paul Manifort and Roger Stone were part of a lobbying firm that worked for Mobutu Sese Seko, the strongman President of Zaire, and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines (p. 61).
Part II: “Tools of Rule,” focuses on the devices used to define, achieve, and maintain power: obsession with national greatness, propaganda, corruption, violence, and especially notions of male virility, which connects of these methods of power together. A strongman’s virility is a “strategy of political legitimation,” sets the tone for the regime’s goals, and buttresses his personality cult (p.121). Strongmen use their virility to dominate everyone around them. Nazi ideology promised to liberate women from women’s liberation, Muammar Gaddafi created a female military academy and had a Department of Protocol to procure and imprison women for sex, and Silvio Berlusconi warned Italian women that they were so lovely that the state could not protect them from rape (pp. 121-32).
Part III: “Losing Power,” presents a number of stories of resistance to authoritarianism, as well as chronicles the decline and fall of various regimes. A new Epilogue was added to the 2021 paperback edition which addresses the twenty-first century slide toward authoritarianism and illiberal rule, the effects of the COVID epidemic upon various major democracies, and the waves of protest in Chile, Hong Kong, and the United States following the watershed year of 2020. Ben-Ghiat weaves the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Trump’s subsequent “Stop the Steal” campaign, the cooperation of Republican Party mainstream leadership, and increasing threats of violence toward lawmakers into the authoritarian schema.
Strongmen is ideal reading for the average person, simply written and easily understandable. Ben-Ghiat’s historical evidence is repeatedly complimented with references back to her authoritarian playbook central argument, making it very easy to see what such disparate figures as Berlusconi, Putin, and Trump share in common. Firsthand accounts from survivors of autocracies are interspersed throughout, adding poignancy to the horror Ben-Ghiat describes. After Franco’s death in 1975, for instance, underground grassroots organizations began looking for more than 100,000 Spanish citizens who went missing during
Mussolini once told a journalist that the secret of his power was to “keep your heart a desert” (p. 239). Strongmen acknowledges how endless lying, corruption, cruelty and divisiveness can lead to despair, the antidote to which is compassion and love. In Istanbul’s 2019 mayoral race, Ekram Imamoglu, an opposition candidate to the autocratic President of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, ran on a platform of “radical love,” reaching out to Erdogan’s supporters with sincerity and compassion (p. 219). Imamoglu’s victory, Ben-Ghiat suggests, demonstrates one of the possible methods by which pro-democracy advocates can stem the ever-growing tide of authoritarianism within their own societies. Indeed, societies that are faced with extreme ideological polarization and inter-communal tensions can either succumb to authoritarian forces or stop the cycle with dialogue, solidarity, and love. In light of our current situation here in the United States, this may seem simplistic and even impossible, but these are what strongmen fear the most, and the very act of keeping hope alive is an act of resistance. In clarifying the authoritarian formula, Strongmen is an exhortation to appreciate and collectively protect our fragile democracy.
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