Authoritarians From Mussolini to Trump (review)

STRONGMEN
Mussolini to the Present
By Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Ever since the 2016 election, observers like Timothy Snyder, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt speculated that Donald Trump could undermine American democracy and move the country in an overtly authoritarian direction. That possibility grew more plausible over the years of the Trump administration, as he sought to undermine a growing list of American institutions that stood in his way, including the intelligence community, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, the courts, the mainstream media (which he branded “enemies of the American people”) and of course the integrity of elections themselves. Trump made his authoritarian instincts clear by refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the 2020 election.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat contributes to this literature in a book that compares Trump to a wide variety of earlier strongmen, including Mussolini, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco, Muammar Qaddafi, Silvio Berlusconi and Mobutu Sese Seko, as well as contemporaries like Viktor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and others. The author, a historian who has written previously on Italian fascism, is at her best when describing the history of Mussolini’s rise, and the way that insouciant Italians and foreign powers facilitated it.

Unfortunately, Ben-Ghiat provides no conceptual framework for distinguishing between different types of strongmen, and gives us very little insight into Donald Trump beyond what is already widely known. What we get instead is an endless series of historical anecdotes about a heterogeneous collection of bad leaders ranging from democratically elected nationalists like Modi to genocidal fanatics like Hitler. What sense does it make to put Silvio Berlusconi in the same category as Muammar Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein? Berlusconi may have been sleazy, manipulative and corrupt, but he didn’t murder political opponents or support terrorism abroad, and he stepped down after losing an election. Ben-Ghiat notes that many strongmen came to power in the 1960s and ’70s through military coups, but that today they are much more likely to be elected. Wouldn’t it be nice to know why coups have largely vanished?