Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat (review)

Many scholars of authoritarianism noticed striking similarities between dictatorships of the past and President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, policies, and style of rule. Ben-Ghiat’s study of authoritarians from Benito Mussolini to Trump approaches the problem through the lens of a strongman “playbook,” providing a detailed and often intimate history of how these men win, exercise, and lose power. Although heavily focused on European figures—including Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, Recep Erdoğan, and Victor Orbán—Strongmen also examines, to varying degrees, dictators from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, including Idi Amin (Uganda), Mohamed Barre (Somalia), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Augusto Pinochet (Chile), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire), Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines), and Nahrendra Modi (India). The book’s strength lies in the connections drawn across cases, providing “a long view of the authoritarian style of governance, which highlights baseline features that recur in different circumstances” with the goal of helping “us to understand authoritarianism as it manifests today” (7). The book should appeal to a very broad readership, who will find Ben-Ghiat’s insights revelatory and provocative.

The book’s first section opens with an examination of how Mussolini established the strategies and employed the rhetoric that strongmen have used to come to power ever since. Ben-Ghiat writes, “Mussolini prepared the script used by today’s authoritarians that casts the leader as a victim of his domestic enemies and of an international system that has cheated his country” (22). Indeed, she notes, “For the strongman, politics is always personal” (51). Mussolini established a myth that became a standard authoritarian mechanism, wherein the nation faced an apocalyptic crisis that could be solved only by “the male leader as savior” (58). Although the strongman alone can save the nation, failure and accountability belong solely to others. Indeed, as Ben-Ghiat explains, “From Mussolini onward, making sure you have immunity while those who have done your dirty work go to jail has been an essential strongman skill” (50).

The book’s central chapters focus on the strongman’s “tools of rule.” National greatness, which, Ben-Ghiat argues, “is the glue of government,” is predicated on identifying an existential crisis, stoking nostalgia, and promising utopia. In most cases, the solution has involved some form of violent cleansing or constricting of rights, especially the persecution of minorities, whether political, ethnic, or religious. Propaganda, not surprisingly, has been critical to strongman regimes, but a leader’s fostering of an apparent direct connection to his followers, through rallies, speeches, or, in recent years, Twitter has also been important. Ben-Ghiat shows in illuminating detail how strongmen personality cults are not only infused with hyper-masculinity but also with boasts about sexual transgressions (some of them illegal), such as “hosting sex parties with underage women in attendance (Berlusconi), being spanked by porn stars (Trump), or keeping the twin sister of your wife as your mistress (Mobutu)” (121). Although the discussion of Hitlerian violence as redolent of Trump’s policies and threats creates a bit of a disconnect, Ben-Ghiat’s compendium of Trump-inspired violence is sobering.

Because the book is intended for a broad audience, Ben-Ghiat does not frontload a heavy social science, comparative analytical framework. Readers interested in interdisciplinarity may be disappointed not to read more about how Ben-Ghiat chose her case studies. The book focuses on “forms of personalist rule” wherein power is concentrated “in one individual whose own political and financial interests prevail over national ones” (7), thereby creating a system of rule in which loyalty to the strongman, rather than expertise, qualifies people for administrative positions. Fair enough, but why include Franco, for example, and not Hugo Chavez? Similarly, more could be said about typology or degree. Some of these authoritarians utterly dominated the state and civil society, murdering thousands and even millions along the way, whereas others, like Berlusconi and Trump, committed dangerous but much less egregious attacks on democracy and the...