Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 218: Fascist Strongmen 鈥� with Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Speakers: Julia Aoki, Am Johal, Ruth Ben-Ghiat
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Julia Aoki 0:04
Hello listeners! I鈥檓 Julia with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by , Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. Together they discuss Ruth鈥檚 latest book, Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, and the historical linkages between fascists of the past, like Mussolini, to strongmen of the present, like Berlusconi, Orban, and Trump. We hope you enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:39
Hello, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar again this week. We have a special guest, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, is with us. Welcome Ruth.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 0:48
Glad to be here.
Am Johal 0:49
Yeah, Ruth wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 0:55
I'm Ruth Ben-Ghiat. I'm a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. I'm a scholar of fascism, published several academic books on fascist intellectuals, culture, propaganda, including film propaganda, and then authored the book, , which is a global history of right wing authoritarianism, showing how the playbook has changed in some ways and stayed the same in other ways over the last century. And I also have a Substack newsletter where I write about threats to democracy today in the US and in the world, called .
Am Johal 1:34
Great. Thank you, Ruth. Just the鈥攁s we're recording this, Silvio Berlusconi just passed away a couple of days ago. And I'm wondering if you can speak just a little bit about your book on, particularly beginning with Italian fascism, sort of the line between Mussolini and say, a figure like Berlusconi, who, you know, was largely a kind of buffoon, but created a vehicle by which other forms of authoritarian politics got to play out given his coalition building.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 2:09
Yes, and you mentioned 鈥榖uffoon,鈥� and often we hear about Berlusconi as being a buffoon. And he鈥攖hat was part of his public persona, to distract from his corruption and very serious normalization of neo-fascism that he operated. We would never have a neo-fascist Prime Minister in Italy today, Giorgia Meloni, were it not for Berlusconi, who's the hinge between historic fascism and the neo-fascists of today.
He's extremely important. He's a protagonist of my book, for many reasons. But he was the first鈥攚hen he came in, in 1994, and he came from outside of politics, which is quite typical for many of these strongmen figures. Many of them have a background in mass communications. So they're very smart at disseminating propaganda, building a personality cult, and even seeming a buffoon when needed, right. And he, in 1994, he brought the neo-fascists into government for the first time in Europe since 1945. So he broke a taboo. He broke many taboos, in terms of a head of state owning TV networks, disregarding conflicts of interests, he had dozens of corruption trials, and he was like teflon, nothing really touched him until after he left office. But his legacy of normalizing fascism, he styled himself after Mussolini, and also normalizing corruption, are with us today, in many of the right-wing, strongmen that we see in the world. Certainly, Donald Trump, who also, like Berlusconi, operated in a democracy and tried to damage that democracy.
Am Johal 4:00
With a figure like Mussolini, when they enter into the public realm, where they start off at and purport to be, to where they end up, can oftentimes be very different places or their methods of working their relationships to populism. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to the early Mussolini in terms of how he came into public notoriety, his entry into politics, and kind of how he was politically positioned to鈥攌ind of the method and the architecture of fascism and kind of that, that road that oftentimes people aren't taking that seriously and then all of a sudden, there's many changes to the political culture that ensues.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 4:46
Yeah, it's very important to talk about that today and there's a lot of misconceptions. So, Mussolini had been a revolutionary socialist before World War One, and it's important, he was not a reformist socialist, but he was really a violent revolutionary, a superb sloganeer, and he was the head of Avanti, the Socialist newspaper. So, he was very prominent in the socialist movement. And then during World War One he espoused Interventionism because he realized, like some strongmen, he had the ability to see forward and he realized that the war was going to change everything. And, so he thought that Italy should not only not be part of it, that they should be in the vanguard because a new world would be born.
And during the war, he came up with this very fascist notion that we will see in Germany too, the idea that the war was birthing a new elite, and he called it a 鈥榯renchocracy.鈥� It's really important. So instead of the old aristocracy, which he, as a socialist and as a fascist, didn't like at all, you were going to have this new elite of men who had been hardened by war. So the idea of war as struggle, as war as the way, violence is the way you solve problems, is present in this trenchocracy.
So then he became鈥攈e leaves the socialist party gets kicked out and he becomes overtime, he's cobbling together what will be fascism, which was very mystifying for people at first, because it took certain things from the left, like the rhetoric of revolution, early on, and I, I really mean early, he still had some things from a socialist platform, like an eight hour day for workers. And this is when he founded fascism in 1919. Those things disappeared very quickly and in the next years, the way he got to power was fascism, and this is relevant for today, was a decentralized militia movement. And it operated in the countryside, and his squad, the black shirts were the squadres, was only one squad. And at the beginning, he didn't really have control of these squads. And so there was this, you know, they were, they were disseminating violence. They were attacking trade union leaders, progressive priests, and we forget about that, socialists, and so they took power by violence in the countryside in a decentralized manner. And then he built up his personality cult. And so by the time of the March on Rome, in 1922, he was the head of this squadres movement, and he was trying to get these, you know, regional leaders under his control.
But today when we have so much activity, for example, in the United States, of kind of de facto paramilitaries loyal to Trump, we had a civilian army on January 6, that operated a coup attempt, a civilian army in Brazil, January 8 insurrection, we do need to think about the fact that fascism began as a decentralized militia movement, not as a military coup. There are plenty of those in my book, in the Cold War era, but it's like some things that are happening today are recycling elements of the original fascism.
Am Johal 8:11
Wondering if you could speak in terms of how we might, there's terms that get thrown around like fascism, authoritarianism, new authoritarianism, and there's various political movements that ascribe or have multiple features. But how can we define fascism in relation to those other aspects of political culture?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 8:33
The way I see fascism, and this is why I felt鈥擨 wrote Strongmen because I thought it was really time to look back over a century of what I call authoritarianism. Fascism, like early communism, again, I am a specialist of fascism, so except for Qaddafi in Libya, I鈥攖his is a history of right wing authoritarianism.
Fascism was a first stage of authoritarianism, again, along with early communism. And, so that's, that's how I see it. And today, what goes on today, integrates elements of, really the whole history of authoritarianism. So, you add fascism, sews itself to the right wing. Then, you know, what happens when fascism dies, you have a kind of鈥攜ou have Franco, the Franco regime, which is a transition. Then you have the Cold War military coups, where, as I talk about in my book, Nazis and fascists, you know, came to those regimes. And there was a whole body of knowledge that gets transmitted.
And then in my book, I chose the term 鈥榥ew authoritarians鈥� to refer to the 21st century variant. And I felt they needed their own marker, because, for example, today, it's less common to ban elections. You have what's called electoral autocracy. So you keep elections going, but as happens in Turkey and in Hungary and elsewhere, you game the field of competition in various ways. You domesticate the media, you don't necessarily ban other parties. I felt that we needed a term, that it's not just fascism. And I have been somebody, there are certain people I now will call fascists in the United States, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, sometimes Trump, but I didn't early on. I thought it wasn't useful to use the word 鈥榝ascism,鈥� because people think, 鈥淲ell, there's other parties, there's a free media, so what are you talking about?鈥� So it's been a work鈥攖he book is a work of civic education to try and sort all these things out.
Am Johal 10:49
So in the American political context, with its hyper partisanship, the more recent phenomenon of the Republican Party becoming the vehicle by which fringe movements on the right are attempting to realize their political dreams. Yeah, these political positions were once firmly on the fringe that didn't used to be articulated in public or finding political purchase. And it's played out over numerous political cycles now, and Trump's election in some sense being the symptom of a much longer dysfunction. Is it fair to say that it's no longer a bug, but a feature of the system now, that the far-right has nested themselves within a traditionally mainstream, you know, a right-party like the Republican Party?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 11:38
Yes, sadly, what happens鈥攊t's this kind of systemic thing. When you get somebody like Trump who comes in and disrupts everything and builds on authoritarian directions of the GOP they were going in before, but hugely accelerated everything, provided a big tent, and charismatic demagogue for all the extremists, legitimized lawlessness, both because of his person, his whole own鈥攈e is unique, he truly is unique, there is no one as criminal and as in as many ways as Trump. So he managed鈥攁nd with all the admiration and ties to foreign mafias and foreign autocrats, there is no one else like that. So he was uniquely suited to, to domesticate the GOP and transform it, give it the impetus to transform it into, how I see it today, it is an authoritarian party operating in a democracy.
And although there are other people running against Trump now, they are in thrall to his personality cult and Trump is a cult leader. And so personality cult and authoritarian cult dynamics determine a lot of what that party does and why they have stuck with him through two impeachments, through investigations, and now the indictment. They stick with him no matter what and that鈥擨 have lines in Strongmen, which was, again, completed in 2020, about this phenomenon in other countries. So it is seeded into the system now.
And January 6, the coup attempt, hugely radicalized the party further. It happened because of radicalization, but it was like a thunderbolt. It鈥攖alk about breaking taboos. It gave people like, you know, different politicians, this kind of light bulb went on, that they could get away with anything. And so that's why instead of renouncing Trump and disavowing Trump on January 7, they doubled down and now 1/3 of our House, in our Congress, is composed of election deniers. They're violent. There's, there鈥檚 calls to violence by major Republican politicians every day.
So these鈥攕o if we're talking about a playbook that started with fascism, propaganda, corruption, because election denialism is also corruption, violence, all of these elements, machismo, all of these elements of the authoritarian playbook that started with fascism are present in the GOP behavior today.
Am Johal 14:27
In, you know, as I travel through the US and talk to cab drivers and people working in restaurants about the appeal of Trump, what's interesting is that, what many people say is that they don't really like Trump, but he's kind of the figure they wanted to send in to disrupt the system. And so the buffoonery that comes with him, or this spectacularization, are a kind of like a professional wrestling presidency. As somebody who's done reality TV, he has an aspect of tapping into popular culture in a way and there's something to that link with fascism. I'm trying to understand about, you know, these figures historically, and how we can think of Trump in terms of being able to step into a moment and disrupt pieces, where people who may not be fully immersed in politics, kind of, because he's been around so long, he doesn't appear to be dangerous for some.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 15:28
So that's a really good point. I always like to talk about this because the dangerousness of these strongmen, starting with Mussolini and Hitler, they are different types, but they鈥攖his is common to them. They're like a kind of a collector of, of extremism, some of the latest thinking about racism and they're able, each had their own method, but they were superb communicators, Hitler and Mussolini. And they managed to touch a chord in people, many types of people. And the genius of the strongman is that he surveys the marketplace and realizes what's missing. And he will be whatever he needs to be to get to power, he will partner with anyone. And these are people who are transactional, opportunistic, they have zero moral code, which is what makes them so dangerous. And so they have all these constituencies which make no sense like why, like鈥攁nd Berlusconi continued this, he had housewives, he had Opus Dei, he had the mafia, and they're all in there in a happy tribe. And he gives something to everybody.
The same with Trump, and Trump and Mussolini, both, they're among the most impius people you could ever find. Mussolini was not only an atheist, but he hated the church from his socialist days, and yet he was the one who made the Lateran Accords with the Vatican. So fast forward to Trump, again, nobody is more amoral than Trump. But he's the one who has, not just evangelical Christians, but also Orthodox Jews, proclaiming that he was in office by the will of God, and some of these people are still with him, saying the same thing and believing his fiction that he is still somehow the president.
So this ability that comes from these fascists, strongmen, to speak in a way that kind of recycles the popular culture and common sense, extremist common sense, things of the moment. They sell themselves as victims of the establishment. This is very important, the victimhood complex鈥� that's in my book鈥攁nd it makes sense to people and it becomes a seamless worldview. And the most successful strongmen, including Trump, and they not only have media control in different ways in the 21st century, but they provide a worldview and a person, a personage that reconciles all these contradictions.
Am Johal 18:10
You mentioned a little bit of a sort of global context of some political figures. Bolsonaro, who's just been voted, just was voted out, Erdo臒an, Viktor Orban, Modi, all very different political contexts, historical reasons of how they land down but also underestimated in a bunch of ways in terms of how far they're willing to go in terms of changing or rewriting the system. Somebody like Viktor Orban has been politically around for a long time, he was part of the group that was trying to take down the old socialist model, there was the crony capitalism of the 90s, the promises of the EU, but this turned to nationalism and ultranationalism and Central Eastern Europe is almost politically understandable given the historical shifts.
But I'm wondering if you can sort of鈥攖he things that these people were elected in and at the same time, they have gamed the system in terms of judiciary, boundaries around what a free press might be or not be in those situations, and have essentially constructed a context in which they very much benefit or thinks are tilted in their favor by active things they've done since coming into power. And certainly they're very different people from the beginning to where they are currently.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 19:27
Yes, and this is鈥攚hat I found in my鈥攚hen you do a book that goes over 100 years, my point was to find patterns, my research agenda. I didn't know what I would find, but you find patterns. And one is that every society who's faced challenges to their democracy or the strongmen, they're unprepared, they're in denial. They think, 鈥渋t can't happen here.鈥� Even when there's a coup, this was very interesting and sad. In the Chile鈥擨 have Chile as my case study for a cold war coup. Even after the coup, the conservative elites, the head of the Christian Democrat, conservative party, which had supported the coup because, in classic fashion, it goes back to fascism, didn't want the left to remain in power, thought that Pinochet and the junta would establish order again and give back power to democracy to them after six months. And of course, that didn't happen. So, they're always unprepared.
And the speciality of the strong man is to do the unthinkable and some of them do it quickly, like Hitler, who actually studied Mussolini very carefully and didn't want to do the, the slow developmental approach. So he had the Enabling Act and all of that, we know. But today, it's more common to get in there, and then stay there for a long time. And over time, like the, what is it, the frog boiling in, yeah, you boil the frog slowly.
But if we just give two examples, we had recent, you know, 22 and 23, we had elections in Hungary and in Turkey. And this shows how effective this electoral autocracy can be. Orban had a six party coalition against him. And they made some mistakes, we won't go into that. But he's been able to domesticate the media. And this is, this is extraordinary. And we don't hear about people falling out of windows, like in Russia. We don't hear about open violence in Hungary. But in 2018, 500 owners of media assets, media properties, donated those properties to a foundation controlled by an ally, a crony, of Orban. 500 donations. That's a lot. And it happened in a short period of time. They gave up their鈥攊t's a form of plunder under threat. We just don't hear about the threat as effectively.
It's, this is鈥擨 always go back to this because that's a major transformation of the media landscape. Why does this matter? It matters because of corruption, because of the way that Orban manages to fly under the radar for threatening people or he also uses the 21st century model, they all do, of using lawsuits, the threat of lawsuits or real lawsuits to financially and psychologically exhaust people. So, things work, it works a bit differently today. There's still plenty of jailings. Erdo臒an is a mass jailer. But they are able to transform the political system. So it鈥攖o go back to the election, the opposition candidate, P茅ter M谩rki-Zay, was not able to even get his message across in many parts of Hungary because Orban controlled the media, so you don't have to have the one party state to make sure鈥攐r weigh the scale so the opposition's message doesn't even get through, or they're presented as some kind of demonization and they don't, they can't answer back.
Just quickly. Second, sad example in Turkey, very recent elections, the only man who could have beaten Erdo臒an is 陌mamo臒lu, the younger, charismatic mayor of Istanbul, who's a thorn in Erdo臒an's side. So what does he do? He slapped a jail sentence on 陌mamo臒lu for insulting the government, and Erdo臒an is a specialist in鈥攈e has tens of thousands of insult suits. So now it was 陌mamo臒lu's turn. This meant that he couldn't be the presidential candidate and instead, they chose somebody who was much older, who went to the right, which was a mistake, and this is again, an example of how you game the competition without shutting down elections, like in Mussolini's days.
Am Johal 24:05
I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the present political context, say in places like Egypt, which has obviously had major political upheaval, and in the Israeli context where there's been a further turn to the right within an electoral context that, that's open, but the political turn is very clear.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 24:25
Yeah, I can't speak about Egypt. But the Israeli example is a good one of the phenomenon of a corrupt strongman, who was under investigation when he ran for office before, like Putin, like Berlusconi, and like Trump, so this, the strongmen today runs for office while under investigation so that they can get back or get to power for the first time or get back to power and shut down anyone who can harm them. And when they're cast out, which happened to Netanyahu, they're even more desperate to get back into power to do this. And the targets are always the same. The press, the judiciary, right, these are entities, nongovernmental organizations, activists, people who can expose their secrets and their corruption. And, and it's really important that this is now a phenomenon, that you run for office and you want to be in office, not to govern, but to protect yourself from corruption charges, from jail.
So Netanyahu, what does he do? It's like, it's like ticking off the boxes of the authoritarian playbook, so he runs for office, you know, recently, gets in and immediately tries to have, quote, judicial reform. And all of the protests鈥攖hese are the largest protests that Israel have ever had. And there was鈥攊t was not lost on the population, what he was trying to do. So it's鈥攕trongmen have a proprietary sense of governance, this is really important. They have no interest in the public good. They鈥攊t's called personalist rule. And this is actually the concept I work with in Strongmen. And so you鈥攖he purpose of governance is to get yourself rich and your cronies, and also to protect you from your corruption being exposed.
And so what's going on there鈥攁nd the inevitable partnering with more and more extremist people is part of this. So, you鈥攂efore you asked about the longer trajectory of these strongmen, they may come in, you know鈥擨 mean, I personally鈥攖hey always tell you how extremist they are at the beginning. We just don't want to listen. But there is a process where they become more鈥攖he more corrupt they become, after being in power, the more lies they tell, the more they steal, their family circles, their crony circles, the more they have to become extreme and ally with extremists. And that's, of course, what's happened in Israel.
Am Johal 27:07
I have two final questions, if you have time. One was just around Putin, if you could speak a little bit to the Russian context and, secondly, in terms of the far-right or fascist, where are people getting their ideas from? You know, there's people that are reading like Carl Schmitt, has made a popularity amongst the right but even broader than that, Ernst J眉nger's experience during the war. There's is this all sorts of people but your, your sense of that, yeah. Or where's the sort of the intellectuals of fascism today, building out their ideas?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 27:42
There are many ideologues, some with interesting transnational connections, you know. To go back to Orban he's got all kinds of schemes to be producing a new elite, this Collegium he has in Budapest. There's Rod Dreher, who is a far-right Catholic American who now lives in Budapest. One of the interesting things we see is the standardization of far-right talking points between Budapest, Moscow, and also Tallahassee, Florida, Erdo臒an, and of course, the new, the newest battle is against trans, against LGBTQ people, but the talking points have become standardized.
And so, you know, I could list people operating in different nations. But I think the big story, it is not only an authoritarian party operating inside of democracy. If you took its foreign policy stances and its alliances, it is immersed in a far-right network that is transnational now. And something that was Canadian in origin, the convoy movement, was very interesting, how the GOP immediately embraced the convoy movement. Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, was kind of making talking points, trying to have Trudeau deposed. These are, these are transnational propaganda points. And so from my point of view鈥攖here's a chapter in Strongmen about propaganda, how it's changed. Looking at how the Americans are in lockstep through the apparition of all these junior and senior propagandists around the globe, is really, it's really scary, and it's an under鈥擨 would say, it's an underappreciated phenomenon.
Am Johal 29:26
Ruth, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat 29:31
Thank you. It's been a great conversation.
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Julia Aoki 29:35
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by 丁香园AV鈥檚 Vancity Office of Community Engagement. This has been our conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Be sure to check out our previous episode on Late-Fascism with Alberto Toscano. Head to the show notes to read up on some of the resources mentioned in this episode. Don鈥檛 forget to subscribe to Below the Radar on your podcast listening app of choice. Thanks for listening, and we鈥檒l catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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