Episode 2 | Strongmen: A Historian on Defeating Propaganda June 20, 2021

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GUEST: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Author, Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present

Authoritarian leaders, from Benito Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, are different in important ways. But they use similar techniques to gain and keep power, such as invoking a sense of nostalgia, assigning blame to a targeted group, demonstrating viritlity, flouting corruption laws, and using propaganda. In this episode, we’ll discuss what history teaches us about how strongmen rise, the best ways to combat propaganda, and how to weaken the strongman.

GUEST BIO:

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is an internationally acclaimed historian, speaker, and political commentator. She is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, and the author of several books, the most recent of which – Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present – is the focus of our conversation.

LINKS: 

Lucid (Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Newsletter)

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Amazon)

Full Transcript

(SOUNDBITE OF FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP)

Hilary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the second amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick (crowd booing), if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the second amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know,

BRAD PHILLIPS, HOST, THE SPEAK GOOD PODCAST:

That’s then candidate Donald Trump in Wilmington, North Carolina, in August 2016, obliquely suggesting that one of his supporters might have a violent remedy available to prevent his opponent Hillary Clinton from passing gun control legislation.

That moment, the first of four I’ll mention, was one of many that let both his supporters and detractors know that his campaign, and, ultimately his presidency, wasn’t going to be business as usual.

These four moments from his presidency and post-presidency may not seem connected to one another. But, as you’ll see, they fit together in a way that makes perfect sense – if you see life through the eyes of a historian.

The second moment, in May 2017, President Trump was about to pose for a photo of world leaders during the NATO summit in Brussels. He found himself toward the back of the pack and, not content to be just a face in the crowd, he grabbed the right arm of the prime minister of Montenegro, shoved him out of the way, and forced his way to the front row of the photograph.

Trump’s often unpredictable treatment of foreign leaders didn’t prevent them from trying to cozy up to him anyway. So, moment three is less a moment than a series of moments in the form of at least 150 foreign government officials visiting the properties he owned and profited from during his presidency – that according to CREW, a nonpartisan watchdog group, which also found that special interests hosted or sponsored 137 events at Trump’s properties during that time, likely meaning he took in millions in revenue from groups hoping to curry favor with the big guy.

Moment four came in the form of a statement he wrote in May 2021, in which he, yet again, cast doubt on Joe Biden’s victory. “Just look at the facts and the data. There is no way he won the 2020 presidential election,” he wrote, echoing a claim he’s repeatedly made since Election Day. No wonder a CNN poll from late April 2021 found that a staggering 70 percent of registered Republicans said Joe Biden did not receive enough votes to become a legitimate president. That, despite no credible evidence supporting those false claims, even after numerous investigations and recounts, many of which were conducted by elected Republican officials.

The four incidents I just cited weren’t chosen at random. His second amendment comments hinted at violence. His shove at the NATO conference demonstrated virility. His refusal to disentangle his business interests from his public service, invited corruption. His insistence that he won an election that he lost relied upon the power of propaganda. As today’s guest will explain, violence, virility, corruption, and propaganda are key ingredients that authoritarian rulers throughout the world, and over the past century, have used to gain and hold power.

I wanted to speak with her because, too often, people, and I include myself in this, react to each provocation with dismay. But rather than viewing them as individual or disconnected moments, it’s important to see how all the pieces fit together as part of an intentional strategy and well-practiced playbook. And while it’s a playbook we hadn’t seen here in the United States before, it’s a tried and tested formula familiar in many countries around the world. And, as the tens of millions of voters who supported Donald Trump and his two elections demonstrated, it’s also a playbook that has tremendous mass appeal.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

PHILLIPS:

My guest, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, is an internationally acclaimed historian, speaker, and political commentator. She’s a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of several books, the most recent of which Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present is the focus of our conversation today. Ruth, it is great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

RUTH BEN-GHIAT:

Thank you for speaking with me.

PHILLIPS:

I’d like to begin just by clarifying a few terms, because I have a feeling I’m conflating things that maybe shouldn’t be conflated. When you hear terms like strongmen, authoritarian, fascist, are they all essentially the same thing or are there important differences among them?

BEN-GHIAT:

So, they’re all authoritarians, and fascism is one stage – the first stage of a century of authoritarianism. And fascism and communism began around the same time. Over a hundred years, things have changed. So that old-fashioned dictator, you still have them – in North Korea where there’s a one-party state, the total suppression of the opposition. But today, authoritarians, it works differently. You allow some opposition. You have sometimes opposition parties and the press. So, we don’t really talk about dictators as much anymore. And the strongmen is a term that’s in use, but I really adopted it to refer to authoritarians who wreck democracy or damage democracy. Because you can have somebody like Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump who don’t succeed in wrecking it, but they erode democracy. Their intentions are authoritarian, and they use virility and machismo as one of their tools of rule. So, this was my criteria for who was in my strongmen book. They had to be authoritarian-minded, wreck or damage a democracy, and use machismo very prominently.

PHILLIPS:

I didn’t say to you when we were talking before the podcast began that I actually found your Twitter feed pretty scary in the run-up to the 2016 election. And there were times I had to look away from it. Not because I didn’t think what you were saying was accurate, but precisely because I did. I thought you were very clear-eyed in a lot of the things that you were seeing. And, in hindsight, it seems to me that there were two separate ways that the conversations that were happening back at that moment were occurring. I feel like some people, pundits, and a lot of people on the political left, were hearing one conversation, and supporters of President Trump were hearing a completely different conversation. And I’m wondering if you could help reconcile those two conversations for me.

BEN-GHIAT:

Thinking about 2016?

PHILLIPS:

Correct.

BEN-GHIAT:

Yeah. I think that I was clear-eyed because, I’m not a specialist in U.S. history and I’m a first-generation American. And so, the conversation at home growing up and what I chose to study was more global. And so, I was able to look at the states, what was happening, through the lens of global autocracy and having studied fascism and propaganda for so long. And it made perfect sense to me that there was this framework. And so that set me apart from many, many people, including some of the media who had democracy as their default and their only paradigm. And so it was, they were slow to catch on to what Trump was doing. And this is how in the media we got both sides, giving both sides, because they were working with a framework of democracy. You can’t blame them, that’s all they knew. But I looked at it from a different point of view and that’s what led to my analyses. And I’m so sorry that I’ve been right about everything, because as you say, it’s quite dire. And sometimes I would scare myself. There were a couple of early CNN op-eds I did that were, you know, kind of forecasts. And one of them, which CNN entitled, Trump and Bannon’s Coup in the Making, about striking at the state, I had to go and do yoga in the middle of writing it, which is unusual because it was very, very clear to me what was happening, but it was also quite terrifying.

PHILLIPS:

And I feel to some degree, you are shouting into a void because precisely people didn’t have that framework, they might’ve seen it as scaremongering. When in fact, you were seeing a pattern that you’ve seen throughout the world. And one of the things I really liked about strongmen, your book, is that you, or strongman rather, is you used a lot of … you dissected a lot of different authoritarian types from Mussolini, Moammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, and others. And one of the things that became very clear is, yes, we could look back with horror on what occurred during their regimes, in some cases. But, at first, many of them were very popular. And what is it about their rhetoric and their appeal that gets such popularity? At least at the beginning.

RUTH:

One of the purposes of writing the book was to look for patterns, because I am a historian, and look at what has changed and what has stayed the same. And the evolution part is really important because I’m not saying that Berlusconi is like Hitler is like Mobutu, that would be a-historical and silly. But there are patterns that recur. And one of them is when a society has had a lot of change, socially, it could be workers’ rights, it could be like, of course, after World War I, you know both communism and fascism came out of this wrenching dislocations of World War I. But, many other times, for example America had eight years of an African-American president. We had the legalization of same-sex marriage. We had, the start of full women into combat in the military. And these were changes that some people felt were long overdue and others felt were just the end of everything. It was like the apocalypse.

And so, we were the latest country to have the set of circumstances necessary to claim a figure like the strongmen. And part of their appeal is that they promise to fix what people …  they read the political market, and they will be whatever people need them to be. And so, they’re opportunists. And so, Trump realized there was this forgotten, the forgotten people, people who were very angry about change, people who were racist and didn’t perhaps want to say it out loud and he would be their voice. So, they read the market and they will be what you need them to be. And then they promise greatness, these kinds of fast style glories. So, they make the nation great, but it’s also making it great again, because they have nostalgia. So, this is where people don’t like what’s going on. They want things to be the way they used to be. So, make the nation great again.

PHILLIPS:

You note in your book that (Trump’s) use of rhetoric and repetition was striking. And you really gave some interesting data. When you looked at 64 rallies held between February 2017 and August 2019, you noted that he mentioned immigrants more than 500 times, surprisingly he didn’t do so in positive terms – 189 mentions of immigrants were as criminals, 32 times as killers, 31 times as predators. I think in broad terms, everybody understands what the practical effect of that type of repetition is. But could you talk a little bit about how propaganda is intended to work and why repetition of something that’s so demonstrably false tends to break through anyway.

BEN-GHIAT:

Propaganda needs two main principles. One is repetition, and that’s because familiarity breeds acceptance. There are studies showing that when people, first impressions are very important. So, a first impression, even if it’s a lie, has far more ability to imprint on our consciousness than the correction does, than the refutation does. So, you need repetition. And Trump was like a one-man machine of repeating lies. He’s a highly skilled propagandist. The other thing you need is saturation. You need the same message with tiny variations to be disseminated all through society. Now, old school dictatorships, where you didn’t, where you weren’t allowed to have any opposing voices, they had an easier time of this. So today, somebody like Putin, he has people who are thorns in his side, but social media is the circuits of repetition. And the way social media works compensate for the lack of the North Korea-style, like only one voice is heard. Because social media is about circulating the same thing. And we become not just consumers of media, like old school (when) we used to listen to the radio or read the paper, (but) now we share. And we elaborate on the message through memes and through commentary retweets. And so, we become part of the process of this repetition with small variations. Those are the main principles. And Trump understood this very, very well, as did his whole operation.

PHILLIPS:

Thinking back to 2012, I wrote an entire series on the potential 2012 presidential candidates, looking at their communication skills. And I rated Donald Trump very low because he’s not the most articulate speaker, but I completely missed that propaganda is a type of communication that has a much different set of metrics to judge its success. And I think that same trap I fell into is what a lot of other pundits fell into. And when you bring up social media, that’s actually where I was hoping to go with you next. In your book, you talk about obviously the types of platforms evolve over time. Hitler used radio. Mussolini used nonfiction film. Berlusconi used television. Do you see social media as fundamentally different from all of those other channels because it’s democratized it in the hands of so many people? You described it as a portable propaganda feed.

BEN-GHIAT:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

Or is it really just yet another channel, another new channel, and inevitably there’ll be another communications channel down the road that does something similar.

BEN-GHIAT:

It’s kind of both, because it accelerates the fundamental principles of propaganda. It accelerates cycles of repetition. It accelerates saturation. Everybody can become an author, a coauthor of the lie, right? In some ways, what I found very interesting is there are obvious things that social media has changed. Like the idea of citizen journalists, everybody has a smartphone. Everyone can participate and share. But things like personality cults, this was really interesting to me. The canons or the rules of personality cults, they haven’t changed at all for a hundred years; where now the medium, the information technology used to disseminate them is different. As you said, Mussolini had newsreels and Bolsonaro uses Twitter. But the idea that the leader has to be an everyman, like a man of the people, but also a Superman. This kind of everyman, Superman thing, it’s exactly the same as it was a hundred years ago. The book is designed – the chapters are organized thematically – to help people look at over a hundred years what has changed and what stayed the same.

PHILLIPS:

Right. So, when Donald Trump stood up and said, “I alone can fix it,” you looked at that and said, that’s familiar. I’ve seen that pattern for the past hundred years or so.

BEN-GHIAT:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

One of the other things that Trump is a master of, and we’re speaking of him in present tense, obviously, he does not have the same platforms available to him that he did until January 6, but he was a master at creating chaos. And a lot of people would look at, for example, as you note in your book that his former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, I believe, famously was sitting on his toilet when he saw the tweet that he was fired. A lot of people were horrified by that. And yet you looked at that and you said, oh, that’s the kind of chaos that a strongman uses as a very purposeful tool.

BEN-GHIAT:

Yeah. These are people who thrive in chaos. They thrive in situations of … they need constant movement around themselves. And, so their governance structure, which gets to Rex Tillerson, they create these inner sanctums around them of flatterers and sycophants and family members, because they’re all corrupt and they need people to keep their secrets. But the loyalty quotient keeps going up. And so, inevitably, most people, except for family, displease them. So, their governments are like a revolving door where people are getting hired and fired. Like Mobutu was hiring and firing the same people several times (LAUGHS). It’s like (what) happened with Jeff Sessions in our country where he was the first person to back Donald Trump. And then, he was rewarded attorney general, and then he didn’t, he wouldn’t collude and abuse the rule of law. So, he was fired.

And then he, like, the whole thing, he cycles, and this is a lot of chaos. And so that the book wanted to debunk the myth of authoritarian efficiency, looking at how these are very dysfunctional and chaotic governments. And, even somebody like Augusto Pinochet, who we think of as the Chilean dictator. He’s a military, he’s a general. And you think he’s so stable. In 17 years, he reshuffled his government 49 times. And he had rages. They all have anger problems. They’re very impulsive. And so, I wanted to draw the curtain back and show that what we were seeing in the papers as chronicled by White House correspondence about Trump, and then the tell-all books with completely normal in the history of authoritarian rule.

PHILLIPS:

I thought you also did a very nice job in your book of pointing out that, that chaos of the officials not knowing if they were the next one to be fired is also essential because it helps to bind people to them and increase loyalty.

BEN-GHIAT:

It connects to the corruption because everybody, no one can feel safe except the leader. And that’s why Rex Tillerson, who was fired while he was scrolling on the toilet, he joins a long history of people.  Mussolini used to make his – these are very high officials like Rex Tillerson was – head of the fascist party found out in the newspaper. He read the newspaper and found out he was fired. And again, these are humiliation games. Mobutu would make a big rally and it’s on television. And then he would announce who was going to be fired in front of everybody. This creates complicity. It’s called divide and rule. And it keeps everybody at each other’s throats because they never can feel certain and then they hate each other. And that is good for the leader.

PHILLIPS:

And I think it’s important for all of us to be aware of that. When a White House spokesperson goes out and says something and two hours later Trump would come out and then contradict it, a lot of people would look at that and say, oh, there’s mixed messaging coming from the White House. On one hand there is. But on the other hand, it’s exactly what the message is. Chaos is the message for the authoritarian-like ruler. I want to be careful with how I phrase this because I am not drawing a direct parallel here. I do want to be, I’m mindful of that expression that history doesn’t always repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes, and it’s in that spirit that I’m bringing this up. I did not realize until I read your book that in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler’s hate speech got him banned from public speaking in many German states. Of course, right now, Donald Trump has been effectively banned from Twitter and Facebook. Although at least Facebook is now reconsidering the ban. I think the independent commission has given the company six months to look at their criteria and see if Trump should be allowed back on the platform. How much of a parallel should we judge in terms of the level of danger of giving him a platform again?

BEN-GHIAT:

Well, there is this throughline in right-wing history that started with Hitler, who, in the 1920s, when Weimar Germany was a democracy, limited democracy, and Hitler was banned at the states’ levels (there were German states). He was banned from speaking because he was fomenting hate speech. What’s interesting is, and I have a picture, a reproduction of a propaganda poster from the Nazi party, they made him into a kind of canceled hero. And they put out a protest poster. It was going to be a rally to protest Hitler being silenced and censored. And they had a picture of him with tape over his mouth. And of course, the big principle here is that the right, the violent propagandistic, right, racist right which wants others to be harmed in some cases, if they’re censored, they cry victim. And so, a lot of the right-wing cancel culture now, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, these are people who supported January 6, which was an act of political violence. They’re crying victim. And it is tricky in terms of First Amendment. Do we ban people? But look what happened with Hitler. And this has been, again, the throughline for many right-wing leaders who play the victim and then they get to power, and they victimize others, often in murderous ways.

PHILLIPS:

And even the cancel culture dynamic you just described being something that is just, yet again, history repeating itself is worth noting.

BEN-GHIAT:

And Trump was – the New York times did a big study – that Trump was the biggest driver of coronavirus misinformation, and that cost lives. So, there’s a price to pay for allowing these people, when they are so effective as Donald Trump is.

PHILLIPS:

So, if we try to dig ourselves out of this sense of dismay and, and try to say something, maybe I need this for my own self-care, a sense of something empowering, you recently wrote about this technique called exposing the device, which I think is really smart. And using your example that you just talked about – election misinformation – there’s always a danger in repeating the lie because then the propaganda gets extended. And as I’ve spoken about before, in many ways it also is the exact incentive that some of the bad actors are looking for. When everybody rage tweets at Marjorie Taylor Greene, we increase our profile and that’s really good for her. Tell us a little bit about exposing the device and how that could be effective in helping to combat misinformation.

BEN-GHIAT:

This is something I came up with from studying how propaganda operates and the futility of getting into, if someone tells a lie and you need to refute it, it can quickly become a “he said, she said” thing, even though it’s truth versus fiction. So, if someone is saying something that’s a lie, instead of saying, “No, it’s not, that’s not true,” exposing the device is about you going meta, you go higher and you talk about why they are lying. For example, when someone is saying that January 6, if you’re saying, well, January 6 was a huge act of political violence, and you have a Trumper who says, “No, it was hardly anything. There were tourists in the Capitol.” You could say, “No, it wasn’t.” Or you could say, “Well, you’re saying this because you are trying to hide the fact that the law-and-order party is backing an event that got 140 Capitol police officers injured and several died. And so you’re trying to hide the violence, because it’s embarrassing to your party,” something like that. You go to the higher principle, and you show why they are lying instead of what. You go to the why and what not the what.

PHILLIPS:

What I like about that is, as you said, the alternative is a “he said, she said,” and the moment you say to somebody, “But here’s why you’re wrong,” or “Here’s why he’s lying,” the conversation shuts down. Your ability to influence or persuade that person goes down to zero. But if instead you say, “You know, here’s what I find really interesting about that. Take a look at what he said here. Let’s examine the reasons why he might have said that.” And especially if the historical analog you could choose as something that they agree with, now, there’s an opportunity perhaps to persuade people when otherwise they would have shut down.

BEN-GHIAT:

Yes. And if you are in a public event when this exchange happens, it’s very important that you direct the explanation of the larger principle to the audience, because you’re exposing what this person is up to. You want to give an explanation. This is also known as you’re speaking over them, not in real time, but you are directing your principle to the people who need to know about it.

PHILLIPS:

That’s also brilliant because drawing a connection to our work with public speaking, for example, if you receive a question from somebody in the audience that’s very adversarial or hostile, a lot of people react to that defensively. You almost want to debate the person to prove them wrong. And you forget that your real conversation is with everybody else in that room, who may not share the opinion. But the longer you engage in the debate, the more the audience might actually turn against you, just because the way you’re talking about it is so unsavory. Is there anything else you can say regarding other techniques throughout history that have helped remove or weaken the strongman?

BEN-GHIAT:

I mean, in terms of communication, during the end of communism, some dissidents started to do something similar to what I described. Instead of trying to argue with the communist hierarchy, they started to just address the nation. So, there again, you’re starting to, in a situation like that, you need to establish your own legitimacy. So, there’s that. But in terms of other types of things, nonviolent mass  protest has been shown throughout history to be the most effective kind of protest. Because the people who are massing to protest election fraud or police brutality are not only sending a message to the leader, they’re sending a message to all the elites who back him. And historically, if these mass protests grow in size, they can grow like at the end of communism and communism was falling. This is when you can get something called elite defection, where elites who have been backing the ruler start to realize that history is not on his side anymore. And this happened in Arab spring. It happened with Gadhafi and often this is after real regimes. So, it’s not as applicable to America, but I would like to say that, although we talk a lot about the rising tide of autocracy, we’re also in the middle of a historic wave of protests around the world. In 2019 and 20, even despite coronavirus, there was historic levels of protest. And you think about the black lives matter. And one of the reasons the Republican party is acting the way it is it sees that it was the largest mass movement in American history. They’re on the defensive. And it was multi-generational. It was multi-racial. And it’s a huge thing that we haven’t, in fact, quite digested. And it was part of the momentum that led to Trump getting voted out. Mass protests and mass organizing really work.

PHILLIPS:

And it’s remarkable that all of those protests, the largest social movement, I think you phrased it as, happened during COVID. One would think that if there wasn’t a pandemic, it would have been even larger than it was. And before we get to my final question, I just also want to say one thing in your chapter about how to combat or weaken this strongman that I found very moving and I forget the details, but that people were hiding objects in their homes behind walls to just almost just capture who they were, before the authoritarianism crept into their neighborhoods. Can you maybe just give us an example of that?

BEN-GHIAT:

When you have a real, these were cases of real regimes, where your liberty was taken away. I found that acts that were kind of secret personal protests, where people would hide pictures of … a count who got killed in Fascist Italy, the head of the socialist party was murdered and people would hide pictures of him to keep his memory going, to keep the memory of another Italy in that case. And then there was in Chile where you had a coup and change happened very fast, people were hiding pictures and making secret shrines to (Salvador) Allende, who was the socialist president who was killed. And one carpenter sealed a picture of Allende inside the walls of his house. And what’s interesting about that is although Pinochet left office in 1990, he still had a lot of power. And so this carpenter didn’t take out the picture from the walls for like five or six years, because they’re so afraid that the person could come back. Because it’s very difficult to get rid of these rulers. If they don’t get pushed into exile, they could come back. But these were very moving to me that people had these secret shrines and they needed to keep a sense of a different political future alive.

PHILLIPS:

I am hoping we can close with the story, and I am going to terribly butcher his name here, but Ekrem Imamoglu, who ran for mayor of Istanbul in 2019 – maybe you could first correct my pronunciation and then just share the story about why his run for mayor was so extraordinary.

BEN-GHIAT:

Imamoglu ran – so it’s not the capital, but obviously Istanbul is the largest, most famous city (in Turkey) – and he  ran for mayor as an opposition candidate. He was running against Erdogan, the autocrats’ candidate, and he used a kind of counter authoritarian strategy. Instead of having rallies, because a rally is kind of crystallizing the leader and the mass, that’s why Trump likes them and (Recep Tayyip) Erdogan (president of Turkey) likes them. So, he walked the streets and he gave hugs to people. And one of his principles is that he said he was going to not only love people who didn’t like Erdogan, but he was going to try and love people who still liked Erdogan. It was like a heart centered. In fact, his, one of his slogans, his graphic design had a heart on it. It was the opposite of the cruelty and lack of compassion. He won the election and, Erdogan himself had been a mayor of Istanbul, so he took this very personally. Erdogan did the autocrat thing. He declared the election as tainted. He claimed there was fraud. And so, he kicked it up to an Erdogan-appointed election board. They ruled that they had to have a redo. They both campaigned (and) Erdogan got personally involved and he would come, and he would do all these events, but he started to do his usual. Erdogan is a little bit like Berlusconi and Trump, as he has sued thousands of Turks. They’re called insult suits and they are just nuisance suits. And he started to do this to Imamoglu and it backfired. When they did the runoff, the rerun, Imamoglu won with even more of a margin. This was hopeful, not only because justice prevailed, but because Imamoglu was trying to undo this negative populist brand of politics. And I found that very inspiring.

PHILLIPS:

And it also demonstrates that love, which I think when you feel like you are being bullied, is not a sign of weakness that it can, as you said, be a very effective anti-authoritarian measure that drives results. And to that end, I think it’s worth ending with your words from your book, Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present, in which you wrote: “There are two paths people can take when faced with the proliferation and polarization and hatred in their societies. They can dig their trenches deeper, or they could reach across the lines to stop a new cycle of destruction, knowing that solidarity, love, and dialogue are what the strongman most fears. And that’s the point, it’s not love and solidarity for its own sake. It is that too, but it’s also because it is an effective measure to weaken the strongman.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, thank you very much for joining us.

BEN-GHIAT:

Thank you.

PHILLIPS:

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the author of Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present. She’s also the author of a fabulous newsletter called Lucid, a publication about threats to democracy and abuses of power. You can subscribe for free at lucid.substack.com, or for what I think is quite a reasonable fee given the quality of her work, you could become a paid subscriber, as I did this week, to receive additional content that’s lucid.substack.com.

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