STRONGMEN

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.