A friend who posts reactionary memes every day on Facebook admitted to me he not only gets his jollies provoking "your kind," but secretly wishes Trump were president.
You probably know a lot of people like him.
I wish they'd all read Strongmen, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat's 2020 account of modern authoritarianism, now out in paperback.
It's the scariest read you'll find outside a Stephen King novel.
Ben-Ghiat finds every modern strongman—including Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Amin, Pinochet, Erdogan, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Berlusconi, Gaddafi, Hussein, Orban, Putin, Modi and Trump—cut from precisely the same vile cloth.
They're masters in the dual arts of disguise and deceit.
"They don the cloak of national victimhood, reliving the humiliations of their people by foreign powers as they proclaim themselves their nation's savior," Ben-Ghiat writes.
"Picking up on powerful resentments, hopes, and fears," she continues, "strongmen present themselves as the vehicle for obtaining what is most wanted, whether it is territory, safety from racial others, securing male authority, or payback for exploitation by internal or external enemies."
Strongmen rely on distortions, myths, lies, and propaganda to build a faithful audience, banking on followers' willingness to abandon the real world in favor of the fantasy world the strongmen create.
Eventually—as in the case of my misguided friend—there's no talking to a strongman's followers.
"They believe in him because they believe in him," Ben-Ghiat writes.
Their unshakable faith in the strongman leads them to insist you—by believing in a world where people strive to live in peace, right systemic wrongs, and work for prosperity and progress—are "drinking the Kool-Aid."
But strongmen really don't give two shits about their followers and, in fact, are openly contemptuous of them.
All they really care about is robbing the treasury, punishing critics, controlling women and women's bodies, and pursuing vainglorious goals.
Soon—to every other citizen's detriment—chaos, bankruptcy, and warfare ensue, as strongmen lose what little is left of their ability to distinguish the difference between personal lusts and their nation's needs.
Their sick, self-aggrandizing projects invariably lead to their comeuppance and to a national apocalypse, as our parents witnessed in World War II and we're witnessing in Ukraine now.
"Authoritarian history is full of projects and causes championed by the ruler out of hubris and megalomania and implemented to disastrous effect," Ben-Ghiat writes.
Why don't Trump's followers see that?
POSTSCRIPT: Should you find the inclusion of Trump in the company of strongmen like Mussolini and Hitler far fetched, bare in mind that Trump's press secretary has acknowledged he openly admired other dictators' ruthlessness.
"I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him," Stephanie Grisham told The Hill. "He loved the people who could kill anyone."
"I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him," Stephanie Grisham told The Hill. "He loved the people who could kill anyone."
Historian Ben-Ghiat says the "strongman's golden rule is: do whatever is necessary to stay in power."
