- Growing up, I ate heartily from the plate of American exceptionalism that was central to the psyche of the United States in the 1980s.

It never occurred to me that my country might risk the kind of autocracy that plagues so much of the world, but today's guest warns that autocrats have risen frequently from democracy over the last century by relying on a simple playbook that has proved as durable as it is menacing.

She's Ruth Ben-Ghiat, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with The Providence Journal.

- This week, we're sitting down with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and a professor at New York University.

She's also the author of "Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present."

Ruth, thank you so much for being with us.

- It's a pleasure.

- So congratulations on "Strongmen."

We were chatting before we started taping, and it couldn't be any more timely, unfortunately, but for audience members who might not be familiar with the term, what is a strongman?

- So I use the term to refer to authoritarian leaders, so people who destroy a democracy and have a kind of the old-fashioned who's one-party state today.

You don't have to have a one-party state, or they damage democracy.

They have autocratic styles of leadership, and I use the term, so they use propaganda, they use corruption, they use violence, but they also use machismo and kind of hyper-masculinity to legitimize themselves, so that's my definition of a strongman.

- And we find that they have emerged from both democracies and other forms of government as well?

- Well, every autocracy starts somewhere, and there are ones that are formed instantly by military coups, but in other cases, somebody gets elected.

This happened in the first one, Mussolini, and then they progressively destroy democracy, or like Berlusconi in Italy, and I think that Trump in America was trying to degrade and, you know, erode democracy in those countries, and they didn't succeed, but they did a lotta damage along the way.

- So you write that strongmen use many of the same tactics, and I think we should go through some of those tactics sorta one by one, and let's start with an appeal to national greatness.

Talk about how that has been a component historically, and we see it, of course, today with Vladimir Putin.

- Yeah, it's really interesting 'cause these, the strongmen who have success are often, and Putin came from the world of intelligence.

Many of them come from, they have experience with media as journalists or in television, and they know how to appeal to the public and say things that the public wants to hear, so whatever the issue is with that's blocking the country being supposedly a great country, that's what they hone in on, so for Putin, for example, he came to power right after the fall of communism, and there was a disaster, you know, a disastrous economy, and so he was always about let's have national unity.

Let's have national strength, and Mussolini was all about modernizing the country, and because Italians felt that they weren't quite in the center of Europe.

They were kid of always on the margins, but what's very interesting is they promised to make the nation great, so they're forward-looking.

They're modernizers.

They're futurists, but it's also always about making the nation great again, so they also channel nostalgia, so it's utopia and nostalgia.

So Mussolini said, "We're gonna revive the Roman Empire," and today in Turkey, Erdogan says, "We're gonna revive the Ottoman Empire," and you see how Putin is pursuing dreams of a kind of Imperial Russia or reviving some form of spheres of influence and Soviet Union as a superpower, so these are patterns that recur with this myth of national greatness.

- So another factor, another ingredient, as it were, of this mix, is the widespread use of propaganda, and again, if you could talk about that historically, and then also come to the present day, when propaganda propagates, if you'll pardon the horrible pun, through social media.

- Mm-hmm.

So the way I structured the book is that each chapter about each tool of rule goes over 100 years, so you can see what has changed and what stayed the same, and one of the things that hasn't changed is, for example, the leader's personality cult, (clears throat) which is a creation of propaganda, very important, and the rules of the personality cult are that the leader is the man of the people, very relatable, a man of the everyday, but is also a superman, and he's the man who decides what reality is.

In Mussolini's time, it was the slogan, "Mussolini is always right," and only they know this relates to national greatness.

Only they can know where the nation is going.

So you have this attempt to create through lies, institutionalized lying, an alternate reality, and you use censorship, of course, to block out any facts you don't wanna hear, and all of these things continue up to today, but with social media, you have also the addition of an attempt which is the Russian information warfare playbook, which is also used by other leaders, used by Orban.

It was used by Trump, and that is you don't only create an alternate reality.

You also degrade the notion of truth in the absolute so that looking for the truth becomes exhausting, and you can't really know what the truth is, and so the modern, I mean, conspiracy theories were always present.

Think about Hitler and the Jews, but today, it's called the Russian fire hose of falsehood.

This is a high-intensity barrage of rumors, allusions, conspiracy theories, as well as outright lies, misleading claims, and so people, they give up on knowing what the truth is, and that's very convenient to leaders who are there illegitimately.

- Ruth, one of the other features of the authoritarian playbook that you write about is virility, and I have to tell you, as I read that chapter, I was sorta horrified, and but also, it just seemed very current and relevant.

Talk to us about the power of virility in the authoritarian playbook, and is there some reason that we're always talking about men?

- (laughs) So when I did my research, I'm a historian, but I make use of lots of political scientists', you know, researches, and I saw that there wasn't really room for taking masculinity seriously.

Even though we had, you know, Mussolini and Putin are the two who stripped their shirt off, and the male body, the body of the male leader, is very important as a symbol of him as the defender.

He's also a sex symbol, and so I thought, you know, we really need to take this seriously, and in fact, you see how with these dictators and people like Putin today, it's deadly serious.

It's not just a joke that they're stripping their shirts off and showing how virile they are because it connects to corruption.

For example, they are the men who get away with everything.

They can get away with things that ordinary men and women cannot, and so this kind of lawlessness, which is at the heart of authoritarianism, which is the abandonment of the rule of law, and really, the legalization of lawlessness.

You have criminals in power, and in fact, Berlusconi, Trump, and Putin were under investigation when they came to power.

So government becomes a kind of self-defense, and the masculinity is an aggressive tactic to show I can do what you cannot, and I am invincible.

I am omnipotent, and all of these things, and this is something that has endured through 100 years, and these kinds of leaders, they like to boast about their virility and their strength, and so when Trump in January 2016, when he said, "I could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and I wouldn't lose any followers," I thought this is a very, very bad sign for America because there's only one kind of political candidate who, in a democracy, who would ever say such a thing, but you do that if you're hyper-masculine and you're warning people that that's how you're gonna behave.

- Well, I was also struck by, I think there are about 17 or so strongmen that we encounter in your book.

More than one of them has either faced allegations of either rape or sexual assault.

Is that a trait of strongmen in general, or are these just a particularly onerous, odorous set of individuals?

- These are lawless people, and unfortunately, we see throughout time that their personal qualities of arrogance, of brutality, which includes brutality toward women, they just, it's the same.

Think about it this way: they take what they wanna take.

They don't believe they have to ask.

They don't believe in debating, so they don't like parliamentary democracy, and so a certain type of personality is adapted to get to power this way and then destroy democracies, and this is often a personality that just does what he wants with everybody around him.

So I felt it was important to write about these, how Mussolini and Qaddafi in particular in Libya, they used state resources to have these kind of machines of personal pleasure, almost like a Jeffrey Epstein was the head of state, and to find women and to, you know, have them at his beck and call, they used their bureaucrats, their secret police, and so this is a form of rule in which the personal predilections and personal desires of the leader become part of state policy in a way, and they use the state apparatus for their personal desires.

That also includes stealing.

So Putin has an authentic kleptocracy, and all the apparatus, Gazprom, all the big conglomerates, they are preyed upon for Putin and his oligarchs, and then they siphon off the profits into the offshore finance, and this is all in the news now because of sanctions, but these leaders have always done this, and Qaddafi also had a kleptocracy.

He did exactly the same thing, also an oil-rich country.

So the common thread is that everything belongs to the leader personally, in his mind: the bodies of citizens, the natural resources, it's all his, and so there's no separation between public and private in the minds of this kind of leader.

- I just wanna follow this thread on the toxic masculinity, hyper-virility, you know, through to one last point 'cause you write about this.

When these types of leaders, when these strongmen meet authentically strong female leaders, like in Angela Merkel, what happens?

- Yes.

So you know, often, it can be confusing because these hyper-masculine, openly sexist leaders do promote women.

Putin has, he just reappointed a woman as the head of the Central Bank of Russia.

Now, not in Mussolini's time, but in 21st century, they often have women, but the key is that those women have to be subordinate to him.

The problem comes when you have to deal with someone as your equal, and we saw how Trump treated the apparition of Hillary Clinton.

It was, "Lock her up," right?

And there's a story in my book that, when Putin had to deal with Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, he tried always to psych her out.

He made her wait for three or four hours, and he discovered that she had a fear of dogs, and he has a dog, and that dog is famous in Russia, and so when she was coming to see him for a particularly delicate negotiation where he felt insecure, he unleashed his dog in the room, hoping to make her have a panic attack, and then she said afterwards, "Well, he has to do this 'cause this is all he has.

He doesn't have any real government.

He has no real economy.

All he has is this kind of machismo and these tricks," so I thought that was a very telling episode.

- So have you attempted, or do you have any thoughts on the psychological makeup of these people?

And I'm referring to, you know, where they might fall on the DSM.

Are we dealing with sociopaths, narcissists, borderline personalities, all of the above?

Again, I don't know if that's an area where you wanna go or can, and it would be, you know, diagnosing from afar, but what are your thoughts on that?

- So I'm not a mental health professional, so I don't in the book use the terms narcissism, sociopath, but they definitely check the boxes, and there is a common personality type.

Each one, of course, is a little bit different, but they are amoral, so they have absolutely no moral code.

They are completely transactional.

They are completely opportunist, and this allows them, actually, to appeal to a lot of different people because the kind of checks on lying or on deceiving people that others who are not like them have, they just don't have them, so they tell one person one thing, and then they tell the next person the opposite, and so that's why throughout history, this type of ruler has these very eclectic constituencies, and this goes up to somebody like Trump today.

You have gangsters.

You have priests.

You have housewives, and these people have nothing in common, but he's told each of them what they want to hear, so that's one thing.

The other is that there's a demand for loyalty, which is never-ending, and you can serve him for years faithfully, and if you do one thing, look what happened to Mike Pence, (chuckles) who was four years of the poker-faced yes, yes, yes, and then he didn't do what Trump wanted on January 6th, but this is why there's a myth that authoritarians are very stable, and they keep the country together, and they're efficient, but their governments are actually totally chaotic because they're constantly hiring and firing people because nobody is ever loyal enough, and this comes from what some would say their narcissism.

They need constant acclamation from others.

They need to humiliate others constantly, so this actually doesn't make for very efficient governments.

- So violence is clearly another feature of the strongmen playbook, and in this state-sponsored or state-sanctioned violence and war, we're seeing that today.

Torture, we're seeing that today, but also violence of rhetoric.

Can you break violence down for us again historically in today?

- Yeah.

These are people, and this extends for what we just said about their personalities there.

They're absolutely brutal.

They don't care about others, and they have this need to dominate, and so they use violent rhetoric from the very beginning.

One of the interesting things I discovered is they start using this violent rhetoric while they're still candidates.

So of course, the example of Hitler, who was obsessed with doing away with the Jews, and "Mein Kampf" is full of, you know, violent rhetoric, and so were his speeches, Mussolini the same, and up to people today, where you have Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is, you know, saying violent things about the left and about LBGTQ people.

You have Duterte in the Philippines, who, while he was a candidate, he said, you know, "Filipinos shouldn't vote for me 'cause it's gonna be bloody if I win," and then the example I cited of Trump saying he could shoot someone.

I mean, who does this?

Somebody who is violent and knows that violent rhetoric is the way to reach a certain type of people, person, because what all of these people do is they appeal to extremists, to malcontents, and they normalize extremism.

This is what you see over and over again, and ultimately, this is very scary.

The goal is to change public perception about violence because it can be very repugnant to some people to either have to do harm to their neighbors, community members, or see them hauled off and not say anything, but the ideal is that you change the perception of violence to make it necessary and even patriotic, and in our country, look what's happened with January 6th, that once the GOP decided it was gonna be all in, it's recasted as a patriotic act and tried to minimize its violence, or there are people who say yes, it was violent, and we need that violence.

So unfortunately, so that there's a direct link between the rhetoric of violence that they start at the beginning, and what happens when they're actually in power.

- Ruth, I don't know.

I'm not really sure how to ask this question, so I might fumble this a little bit, but one of the things that I've struggled with reading your book, but also just observing President Trump over the last six years, has been whether or not this was a studied set of tactics that he himself appropriated or if there was an ecosystem of people who said, "Hey, this is the way to seize power."

Do you have a sense of whether or not this is all studied, and everybody's just sort of trying to mimic Mussolini or if this is actual some, you know, dark power playbook that people are consciously and intentionally adopting?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

So it's both, and Trump is a very interesting example because unlike the other strongmen, he doesn't really read.

Now, I do believe his wife, his first wife, Ivana, that he had, she said he had two books in their bedroom.

One was "The Art of the Deal" that he wrote, (chuckles) and the other was a volume of Hitler's speeches, and it's also true that who does Trump admire?

He admires autocrats.

He admires Xi Jinping of China.

He admires Orban.

He only openly admires autocrats, and he watches what they do, so all these guys watch what each other can get away with, and in fact, Bolsonaro has been inspired by what Trump has gotten away with, so there's that, but there is no, like, Trump is not somebody who's reading a manual, but what I wanted to point out in the book is that he surrounded himself with people who have decades of experience wrecking democracies.

There's everybody from the kind of propagandist Steve Bannon, who is highly versed in the whole right-wing authoritarian playbook.

He's an admirer of Mussolini.

You have Roger Stone.

Now, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort, both in the Trumpian circle, they had a lobby firm from the 1980s on, and one of their clients, they had many dictators as clients, but they were hired, for example, by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1985 to help him fix an election.

So (giggles) these are people with decades of knowledge of how to, you know, ruin an electoral system, how to spread propaganda.

That's a Roger Stone specialty, and there are many more people around Trump who, you know, legitimize criminal methods of all sorts, so that, I felt it was very important to point that out because Paul Manafort was his campaign manager.

Bannon was in the government.

So this is not abstract knowledge.

This is something that was being applied in America and is still being carried on by the GOP.

- So here's something I still can't really understand, particularly after reading your book.

Why aren't these practices in the dustbin of history?

You know, we are less than 80 years from the end of the Second World War.

Why are people today still following tactics that were introduced by Mussolini and refined by Hitler and all of the horrible, horrible, horrible things that resulted from that?

I guess it speaks, you kinda get into that a little bit in terms of people who follows, but why?

I guess my question is why, why, why?

- Well, from the leader's point of view, it's because they feel they work, and every situation is a little different, even though my book shows the pattern.

So one of those that directly speaks to your question is that these men find fortune when a society has gone through a lot of change, a lot of social progress.

It could be workers' rights.

It could be racial emancipation, gender equity, and this is very good news, and happy for many people, and for others, and in the Euro-American context, it's white males, white people in general, who feel that their privileges are eroding.

Their place in society is being taken away.

There may be demographic worries.

That's a throughline.

Mussolini was talking about how, you know, white people were not having as many babies, and nonwhites were in the 1920s before Hitler came in.

Mussolini had a whole plan to protect white Christianity, and the code word is civilization when we hear this today from the American right and Hungary.

So we were very well set after eight years of Barack Obama, and many people thought he should never have been president.

He legalized same-sex marriage.

You had women entering into combat, gender equity in the military, all of these things which are great from my point of view, perhaps, great progress, but other people felt they were an existential threat.

So Trump was able to read the marketplace and realize, like many people before him, that there was a space for this kind of appeal, and so those are the moments where these tactics and these personalities work.

- Ruth, we literally have about 30 seconds left, but what can citizens do as we confront this kind of potential leader possibly coming back in 2024?

30 seconds.

- You can, we're still a democracy.

I mean, you can vote and mobilizing to vote in enormous numbers, also to counteract, you know, attempts to have electoral fraud here.

So that's very important, and never believe that it's too late to save democracy 'cause it is not.

You have to have hope.

You have to have faith and optimism because they'd like to make you think that it's all hopeless.

- Well, we could talk to you for another week about this.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

The book is "Strongmen."

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or visit PellCenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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