Dan Snow's History Hit - Trump, Putin, Bolsanaro: The Return of The Strongman

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

Ruth Ben-Ghiat joined me on the podcast to discuss what modern authoritarian leaders have in common and how they can be stopped. We discussed the strongman playbook from Mussolini to Putin, Johnson and Trump.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello there everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. What a week it is, we've got a US presidential election, we've got another lockdown in the UK. I'll let you into a curious little anecdote here. The lockdown begins at midnight, the night of my wife's birthday, so we can go out for a little birthday dinner. And then the proposed end of the lockdown is at midnight, the day before my birthday, so I can go out for a little dinner that night. So everybody around the world who's still in lockdown and everyone here in the UK that's going back into a more strenuous lockdown, good luck. And we'll be producing a whole ton of content, audio and video, for you to get your teeth into in these dark times. Dark literally and metaphorically. Today, speaking of darkness, talking about strongmen, it's not just Donald Trump. We've got Putin floating around with his top off. We've got Duterte in the Philippines. We've got Erdogan. We've got Bolsonaro. We've got Boris. The list, sadly, is almost endless. Why are we seeing a revival of the strongman? And what are

the historical conditions that gave rise to the strongman? We're going back to one of my favourite contributors. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian, a speaker. She's a political commentator. She writes The Atlantic, CNN, Washington Post, and other places. She's a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. And that's where I met up with her for a previous podcast. She's just written a book called The Strong Man. She goes right back to Mussolini to find out why over the last hundred years, we've been plagued with these deeply insecure men projecting an image of hyper masculinity to tempt us to vote for them and overlook their incompetence and corruption. This podcast is broadcast initially on the day of the US presidential election, and the next few weeks and months may bring an even

sharper focus onto Ruth's book and research. If you want to go back and listen to previous podcasts that I've recorded with Ruth or anybody, they're all exclusively available at historyhit.tv. It's like a Netflix for history. You've got audio on there, we've got video. You just go on to historyhit.tv. Because you're a listener to this podcast, we love you. And you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1. And then you get a month for free. And your second month is one pound, euro, or dollar.

It's been very busy during lockdown. Everyone's into it. We created a lot of new content over the summer. So lots of stuff going up there all the time. The most popular show on there at the moment is Eleni Yanagi. You've heard her on this podcast. She talks about medieval London. She takes a little tour around medieval London. So please go and check that out. But in the meantime, everyone here is Ruth Bengiat. Enjoy. Ruth, great to have you back on the podcast. I'm really happy to be here.

So we're talking strongmen. First of all, that word is so extraordinary because strongmen, so often the more we learn about them, they turn out to be such weaklings. They turn out to be so insecure. But what is a strongman? I use the word to define leaders of authoritarian leanings. Many of them have been old school dictators. In the 21st century, you have people who are there in power by elections,

Putin and Erdogan, but also somebody who ruled an anomalous democracy like Berlusconi. But the strongman is not just someone who wants to exert his own executive power and perhaps take your rights away, uses propaganda, but also someone who uses virility. And not just to kind of for his public image, but in his relations with other male leaders. Projecting virility, clearly, Ramesses was doing that on the walls of his temples in ancient Egypt. But is there something about modern media that enables that projection of virility,

a story that leads eventually inevitably to TikTok and the narcissism of the current world? Oh, absolutely. I have a chapter in propaganda, because personality cults in the modern sense, require mass media, because one of the principles is that the leader must not only be omnipotent, and here we have again, the virility, the alpha male, but he must be everywhere, omniscient, and you can only have that saturation of society seeming to be everywhere at once. Like Modi in India uses holograms to appear virtually. And Berlusconi in the 90s used satellite TV, which was fairly new for Italy at the time. And so you have to have this kind of infrastructure of technology in order to have this work. Does the story start in many ways with Mussolini?

Mussolini is extremely important. He was the first to have a full-blown personality cult. And very soon after that, the communists became equally the masters of it. But in the early 20s and 1924-25, there was a Lenin cult, but Lenin was dying, and that's why the cult was prospering, whereas Mussolini was very much alive.

And Mussolini knew how to move his body on camera. And at the time, film was silent, so he knew how to make these gestures and like jutting out his jaw and puffing up his chest. And he was extremely skilled as an actor, you might say, as well as a journalist. So he set the template for the display of the body, whether it's clothed or

unclothed, for all these leaders who continue up to our day. One of the saddest things about these authoritarian leaders is that they despise those who love them. And the authoritarian leader relationship is not only love and respect and adulation by the people for the leader, and the leader's ego feeds on this. As I say in the book, they are nothing without their audience. And one of Mussolini's only female biographers, Laura Fermi, the wife of physicist Enrico Fermi, said that Mussolini was an empty shell without his audience. But they also despise their people, and they only care about power and glory and making money. And so they inevitably create these cocoons of flatterers and people around them who only tell them what they want to hear. So they make bad decisions. And so the history

of authoritarianism, although propaganda likes us to think it's all about law and order and prosperity and stability, history of authoritarianism is actually a history of one disaster after another. It strikes me their skill lies in achieving supreme power, but then wielding it almost without exception. They've driven their countries into the ground. And part of this is the destructive personalities that they have, where they are driven to overreach out of hubris and also out of a lack of critical input, because anybody who's going to tell them a truth they don't want to hear is quickly fired or demoted or transferred or killed. And part of it is the structure of authoritarian rule, which exists, I call it personalist rule, where the personality, the individual quirks and desires and obsessions of the leader actually come to set state policy. And all of the structure of governance with the party, which he's the top, gets wrapped around his finger. And this is why, on one hand,

they can seem very precarious regimes. And if the leader goes, the whole regime can go. But it's also why they wield so much power. And they depend on this divide and rule strategy where they keep their underlings at each other's throats, or they have overlapping bureaucracies, such as Hitler did this very well. And this keeps their power secure, and everyone else is insecure. This is history, but of course, it's of very well. And this keeps their power secure and everyone else's insecure. This is history, but of course, it's of the moment. And you are someone who came out way before Donald Trump even won the election in 2016. And you were someone very early saying that you are seeing these patterns repeating.

It was very easy for me and very disturbing in 2015 to classify Donald Trump as an authoritarian in the making. And I started writing about him for the public when I saw him in 2015 at a rally by video doing the loyalty oath and having this emotional bond with his followers that was based on duty, on a hierarchical relationship. And then when he started retweeting neo-Nazi memes and trying to normalize extreme right platforms and making this his constituency, it was very familiar to me and I was filled with a great sense of dread. I started to watch him through the eyes of what I had observed abroad. And so what I've been able to bring to my analysis is I'm not a historian of America. There are plenty of people who are able to situate Donald Trump in American history and look at how extraordinary his domestication of the GOP has been. Because if we think of other authoritarian leaders of the past, such as Mussolini, he

created the fascist party or Hitler, who took command very early of the Nazi party. But Donald Trump has been able to take a party with a very long and grand history and completely wrap it around his finger to the point where GOP senators admitted to a Democratic senator, Sheryl Brown, that they voted for his acquittal from impeachment because they were afraid. It was naked fear and fear of being intimidated, ruined, shamed. And this is the same dynamic that has held in the past. So by the time Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, I'd already written an op-ed for CNN called Trump is Following the Authoritarian Playbook. And unfortunately, everything he has done has confirmed this early diagnosis, shall we say. But what I find so fascinating about authoritarians, Trump even stands like Mussolini, like Trujillo,

like they stand the way, as you say, they have their underlings constantly fighting amongst themselves. They hand out their patronage in a particularly difficult way. But they must just fall into that. There must be some current that brings those... Because I don't believe that Trump has read a playbook or... Like, where did he come up with the loyalty oath? It just seems to happen. Why are we funneled towards strongmandom? There are things that recur. And

you can say that certain leaders like Mobutu in the Congo was very influenced by Ceausescu and by Mao, but most of the time it's the type of temperament and personality that is driven to act in certain ways, and when circumstances conspire to make their rise to power possible, they do the same things because they work. And part of the personality is an absolute need for loyalty, a boundless ego, so that rallies and saturating the public sphere with their face, nothing is ever enough for them. Also the accumulation of riches. And Trujillo was a model for Gabriela Garcia Marquez's book, Autumn of the Patriarch, in which he at the time fantasized that a dictator like he didn't name Trujillo,

but had the sea drained and sold off for parts, for salt and other things. And today, when we witness the way that leaders like Putin or Mobutu in the past kind of stripped their country's economies, or Trump buying Greenland, he was trying to buy Greenland because there's so many treasures that will be released and minerals when the Arctic melts. Marquez's 1970s novel is not that much of a fantasy anymore. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai

warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. You're writing this history book as a warning it must make you incredibly frustrated that the lessons that we thought we'd learned when we dealt with mid-20th century dictatorship those aren't disqualifying i would imagine that you would argue that if people start

behaving like this that should be disqualifying behavior every people has had to learn this for themselves and one of the lessons of doing the research for this book and living in these people's heads, the leaders' heads for two years, and looking at Italy, you know, Germany, Spain, and then the Congo, and whether it's interesting, whether it's a fascist style takeover, or a military coup, or they come to elections today, there are these, you know, patterns that recur. And one of them is the myth that this can't happen here. And there's a lot of cherished national stereotypes that get uprooted when these people come to power. Think of how people thought, how could the Germans be so

barbaric? They have this sublime culture. Or Chileans in the 70s before Pinochet's coup thought, well, everyone else around us has fallen into a juntas and other forms of dictatorship. And we are, you know, literally people would say it can't happen here because we have too much respect for democracy. Our army is too respectful of the Constitution. And then it did happen. And in the case of America, one of the saddest things has been, again, the reckoning with an innate authoritarianism that was played out in earlier decades in U.S. foreign

policy, where they were responsible for many coups and other things that were decidedly anti-democratic. And now with Trump, it's as though this whole tendency has come home. And there are some very interesting new comparative politics studies that compare the GOP, Trump's party, to far-right parties, whether it's Erdogan's party or Golden Dawn or other ones. And we must actually reckon with the fact that the GOP, in its platforms and its methods, is an authoritarian party. And this requires us to throw away some very long standing beliefs about ourselves. We're just recording this interview days before the 2020 presidential election. The GOP doesn't have a platform, does it? They just announced that their

sole purpose was supporting the electoral prospects of Donald Trump. Yes, if you look at the way the GOP operates with Donald Trump, it maps on completely to the leader, kind of elite collaborator relationship in authoritarian states. The outcomes are very different. If you crossed Mobutu, he would have you killed or jailed or tortured. Today, it's actually, in a sense, you know, more interesting that what can happen to you today if you don't back Donald Trump?

Well, you might lose your Senate seat. Look what happened to Jeff Sessions, who came out against him. But the way that GOP politicians have behaved with this displays of loyalty to a point where their new platform was simply backing up Donald Trump, it's hard to see this in any kind of democratic lens. And so we have to come to grips with not just certain party platforms and positions on certain issues, but the way politicians have started to behave under Donald Trump. Again, it's very difficult to see this under a traditional American democratic lens. We should talk about misinformation because that's a big part of your book.

What is it about the use of what we now call fake news, but is actually as old as the hills? It was very interesting in the chapter on propaganda in the book. I look at a century of censorship and misinformation. And one of the changes, there's a huge amount of continuity, which is very interesting. Obviously, the media, the structure of the media changes, the information sources change with digital media. Mussolini used newsreels, Hitler used those and radio, and Trump has Twitter, Estes Bolsonaro, etc. But the principles of the personality cult, adulation and having them monopolize the media saturation, continue on. One of the personality cult, adulation and having them monopolize the media, saturation, continue on. One of the changes, though, is that when you have one-party dictatorships,

there is no competing media to speak of. And so censorship is extremely important, as well as producing false information. But in the 21st century, rather than just censorship, you also have the political warfare, protagonist in the book. He's had journalists murdered or imprisoned for getting out news he doesn't want to be there. But he also has successfully used a huge amount of, some say, misinformation, disinformation to make it difficult to know what the news really is. And people get exhausted and they give up. And so it leads to a depoliticization. And this is the big innovation of the 21st century, which is hugely facilitated by social media and digitization of the news. Actually, you make a really important point there. It's not about mobilizing supporters. It's also about depoliticizing huge numbers of

potential, I guess, making it too hard to vote and encouraging them to believe, as Donald Trump has done, that their vote will not be counted because it will end up in a, you know, a ballot will end up in a trash can or a stream. You know, he's always referring to these kind of ballots that are found discarded. That's right. It is key because in classic dictatorships, you had the news of the regime. Many people always listened to underground foreign radios, right? Radio London was very big in Italy, especially when a regime starts losing its hold. So it's never been complete. But you also had the existence of, you could say, resistance networks of information.

And they had different information. But what was absent and what's very present now is the confusion, the deliberate attempt by the state through conspiracy theories, through all kinds of other disinformation tactics to make people give up on the idea of being political. And this has serious consequences, and it not only affects who consumes what news or if they consume news anymore, but also, as you said, it could have repercussions on who votes. And of course, that's the name of the game. These leaders, nowadays, they have elections and they must use elections to stay in power. They must manipulate the entire

information and election process to keep themselves in power. And the most successful here have been Orban, who now is ruled by decree, and Putin weathered 2011-2012, a huge protest against his fraudulent elections. And he's been able to triumph with this and now, you know, has amended the constitution. So he gets to rule till 2036. So this is a 21st century innovation that my book tracks from the origins in Mussolini, using censorship and violence, so people couldn't vote, and then declaring dictatorship up to today. You're very keen to provide lessons in this book about what we should be looking out for. What are the first signs of a terminal strongman? Because sometimes by the time you notice it's too

late. So in the 21st century, the early warning signs, of course, come when these men are running for office. And one red flag is if they start talking about violence, whether it was Duterte, who was boasting, and this again, we come back to the virility, the tough man. He was boasting that he was going to kill drug dealers. And in fact, at one point during his campaign for president, Duterte said, I'm warning Filipinos not to vote for me because if I win, it's going to be bloody. I'm warning Filipinos not to vote for me because if I win, it's going to be bloody. Or Bolsonaro talking about the biggest cleansing Brazil has ever seen. So when Donald Trump, in end of January 2016, didn't even have the nomination,

he talks about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and not losing any followers. This was a huge red flag because he was saying that he was personally capable of violence and he also considered himself above the law. And again, if you look at this and democratic candidates framework, it makes no sense who on earth would come and start talking about shooting someone if they're running for president. A strong man would. So that's one, the violence. And also, of course, the disinformation, starting to construct an alternative reality. And the third would be immediately attacking anybody who can expose your sins. And this is, of course, the press.

And ideally, this is a kind of insurance policy for the leader on the rise. Because if he does get elected, and then journalists or prosecutors start to unveil his secrets, he needs the public to already think that those journalists and those prosecutors are hacks, that they're partisan. So all of this has to start very early and it's very deliberate. So while we can't say that Donald Trump, who never reads, had studied history and had a playbook in his mind that others had implemented successfully. He naturally did all of these things that were red flags as to his intentions. And the tragedy is that not enough people took him seriously.

Well, these are natural. What can we say? Ruth, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It is so interesting and important to this time when, bizarrely, we see the rise of strongmen. What is the book called, both in the US and the UK? Strongmen, how they rise, why they succeed, how they fall in the UK, and in the US, strongmen from Mussolini to the present. To the present. Very nice. Okay, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. Good luck with it. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour. Head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well.