Strongmen

Ben-Ghiat limns the traits that characterize authoritarians in modern times.

Drawing a line from Mussolini to Trump, the author guides readers in the authoritarian’s playbook, revealing how dictators corrode democratic norms and undermine institutional restraints on their power. This lucid, well-written history makes you think about dictatorship across time, cultures, and nations.

“At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is." So writes Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the top historians of Italian Fascism and a high-profile media expert on contemporary struggles between democracy and authoritarianism. In this wide-ranging study, Ben-Ghiat details precisely how propaganda—"a system of attention management that works through repetition”—figures as one of the autocrat’s chief “tools of rule,” plucking examples from far beyond Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. There’s an audiobook too!

Strongmen reads like a Wanted: For Demagoguery all-points bulletin, so we can identify the qualities that are present in totalitarian rulers. There are specific traits that these men—and they are all men—share, like corruption, deceit, propaganda, violence, exaggerated machismo, and misogyny. Their road to power is launched by apparent idealism in reclaiming the lost power of both the country and their followers. She writes, “The strong man’s trick is to seem exceptional and yet to embody the everyman, with all his endearing flaws.” Subjects range from Mussolini and Franco to the authoritarians of today: Putin, Trump, and Erdogan. The author… show more.