The Steady State Sentinel is produced by The Steady State, a community of former national security professionals who spent their careers safeguarding the United States, at home and abroad. Today, we continue that mission by staying true to our oaths to defend the Constitution, uphold our democracy, and protect our nation's security. Join our expert hosts as they interview field-tested guests whose unique experiences shed light on the crises and challenges facing our nation. Hello, you're listening to the Steady State Sentinel from the Steady State. I'm Jim Lawler, a former senior CIA operations officer, and I've worked some of the most sensitive counterproliferation and espionage cases. Today, we're talking about authoritarianism with Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and what it means for our democracy and national security. Dr. Ben-Ghiat is a professor at New York University and is a noted historian who writes about fascism, authoritarian leaders, propaganda, and democracy protection. She's the author of the New York Times bestseller, Strongmen, How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fail, which looks at the tools of authoritarian rule and how authoritarians can be resisted. She also has a Substack newsletter and a podcast, Lucid, on threats to democracy. We're going to insert those links in our podcast. So welcome, Ruth. And let me start off by asking you, noting that in Strongman, by the way, which I have a copy of, I'd like to say I enjoyed it. I was fascinated by it, but it was very disturbing, very disturbing. I found myself nodding my head as I read it, seeing your citations of historical parallels in the 20th century to what we're going through today in the United States of America, which up until now has been the land of the free and the home of the brave. But I'm starting to wonder about that. So you present in your book a consistent profile of authoritarian leaders in the 20th and 21st centuries, as I said, their traits, their vices, their proclivities, all of these things that they share. So please recount for us, for our listeners, what some of these characteristics are, and note whether you think our current president exhibits these. Yeah, that's a good question. And I would say that until 2016, I had been working for many years on Italian fascism, and thus also a bit on Nazism and Franco, but historic fascism. And it was really observing the behavior of Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, in particular, when he said that he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and he wouldn't lose any followers. And then observing that just a few weeks after that was when the GOP made its approach to him through Jeff Sessions. I started writing for CNN about Trump because I realized that this was somebody who had a lot of those traits and could be extremely dangerous if he were not contained. And so one thing that we see is that they're entirely transactional beings. And this applies to Putin, to Mobutu, to all of them, whether they're communist or fascist. And everybody has a utility until they don't anymore. And because they don't have a fixed code of values, they just do what they think serves them and their power at the moment. And so, you know, the biggest example is Hitler allies with Stalin, and then Hitler invades Stalin. But there are many things. So you can't count on them. They will just always do what they think is best for them. Another thing is despite their bluster of the strong men, they are insecure and weak and frail people who are actually living in fear all the time of people deposing them or coming to get them. And so that's why they require loyalty by everyone around them. And one thing that Americans have had to learn, Mike Pence had to learn it, is that your loyalty is earned every day. You could have years of being the most loyal, faithful person out there publicly praising the leader. And if you do one thing that they don't like, you become the enemy. And so they set up structures. That's why they hire people who are loyalists and sycophants over expertise. And so that's another trait that they all follow. Sometimes I wonder, and of course, I'm not asking you, since you're neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, if this might have something to, Donald Trump's problems might have something to do with a dysfunctional relationship with his father, and he's craving attention. I don't know. Again, I'm not a psychologist, and neither are you, but the thought did enter my mind as you were saying that. Yeah, many of them have damaged relationships with fathers or parents, or they were violent. Like Mussolini was very violent from an early age. He would stab people. By the time he was actually founding fascism with his black shirts, he'd stabbed people. He was a serial rapist. I mean, we're talking hundreds of women, like Gaddafi. So these are very disturbed people. In Trump's case, he wanted to please his father, but he actually learned a ton from his father, because his father was a crook, who was defrauding the U.S. government out of taxes, doing all kinds of things. So he learned from, Trump learned from his father that being smart means, you know, getting away with things. And his father, I think, you know, was never put in prison for his tax evasion and other things. And he learned a model of business and dealing with people from him and also from other charming mentors, such as Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, the latter who, along with Manafort, you know, was working for dictators trying to throw elections for Marcos. These people have a long history of, shall we say, anti-democratic behavior, transactional behavior. And these were the mentors of Trump. You've mentioned the traits of an authoritarian leader. And I confess I'm both horrified and fascinated with it. Maybe the fascination of the abomination, like Joseph Conrad's famous line in The Heart of Darkness. But I'm even more interested in what motivates a follower. I mean, why are these so many mega Republicans out there that seems to stick with him through thick and thin, no matter what the abomination is, they are sticking with him? What is this? What is causing this? Yeah, that's the right question to ask, because really, who would these these dictators be without their followers? What if nobody showed up for their rallies? What if nobody, you know, decided to adulate them? Um, so, so, you know, part of it is if you look at when these people, uh, come up and have success, it's often when there's been a lot of change in a society. And this is a pattern over a hundred years. It could be, um, a moment where things feel like they're falling apart and traditional political, uh, parties, um, are not, uh, sufficient anymore for people or, uh, after the fall of communism, and that's a big one, or after World War I when fascists came up. But often it's when people feel that the, quote, wrong people are getting power in society. So it could be women attaining more equity and visibility, racial emancipation, workers' rights. And it's those times of great social change when the strongman comes up and says I going to fix it I going to fix it by having a kind of male supremacy And that is you know and in Euro context of course a white male supremacy and has different articulations in different areas of the world. But it's when some people feel that they're losing something from the way that society is going. And then the strong men, because again, because they have no inner core, they read the marketplace. And Trump, a lot of them actually had a background in either advertising or media, TV, television, journalism, and they read the marketplace and they make themselves what is most wanted at that moment. And that's, it's very important. And that's why the follower feels seen by him and feels that he will be the protector. He'll be protected. And so literally Trump said, I am your voice. You've been forgotten, but you're forgotten no longer. And he made himself what would work at that moment. And Berlusconi did the same in Italy. So the follower feels protected because of this. And then once they bond, and this is true of elites too, as well as popular followers, These are, it's unbelievable. And it's, it's, what does it say about psychology? Once they bond to the leader or they make their deals, if they're elites, they stick with them through whatever, no matter what happens. It's really hard to break those bonds. For elites, it's because they're getting something out of it and they are afraid that something will happen to them or they'll just lose out. But that is the problem, that once they make the bonds, they will put up with and rationalize an enormous amount of damage and violence to stick with the leader. Is this like an aspect of confirmation bias? yes to some extent especially grassroots people and in fact uh we you know so many of us in the united states have somebody in there you're either your family or your community your church or who uh you can't talk to anymore and the more what happens is and there's interesting studies also from the point of view of people who've been defrauded by like financial con men once people if they start waking up and they start to realize that their idol might have not been truthful with them, they feel deeply ashamed. And so they dig in sometimes. So they start to come out. And that is when it's tempting for us to say, oh, I told you so. You know, thank God you're seeing the light. But that can be counterproductive because they feel ashamed, and the more they realize they were defrauded, and that applies to political things too, the more they can be kind of stubborn. And it can take a long time for them to come out of it, unless something catastrophic happens, and then sometimes it's like a brusque awakening. Well, I mean, I think all of us resent it when somebody says, I told you so. Yes. So I think I... That's not a good... When we're having our conversations, I am urging people to try and have conversations. And I mean, my own mother, she lives in England. And during the pandemic, they had real lockdowns. And she was in a small village. And she started watching Russia Today. And she became totally enchanted with Russia Today. and she had never mentioned Putin. And she started talking about Putin as like the best thing ever. And she developed a rabid hatred of Biden. And so I started, you know, sending her things that I myself had written for CNN about, you know, Russian playbook and this. And she just would say, you're just fake news. You're fake news to her own daughter. So it's very hard when they're in the thick of it to deal with people like that. But we should keep the dialogue going. This is what the experts say. You don't want to push them away further. Well, I had a similar discussion with a very good friend, a friend of more than 45 years standing, a very intelligent man, a very wealthy man, a guy who I consider one of my best friends. And when we discussed the January 6th incident of 2021, he insisted that all of these people were not insurrectionists, but they'd been invited in. And I said to him, I said, where did you get that? I mean, they were invited in and they killed people and attacked police officers. Finally, I backed off because it was a social occasion. And I didn't want to, you know, I have a lot of affection for this gentleman and his wife. but I wondered where did they get their news? So let me ask you this, Ruth. How is there a way, you know, I know this sounds kind of simplistic, but is there a way to deprogram them? I mean, how do these people eventually who follow an authoritarian, why do they break with them? Why do they defect? Do you think these murders in Minneapolis will have some effect on them? I have to clear my throat, sorry. I think that if they're very deep into their disinformation tunnel, as I call it, even murders like that cold-blooded execution style stuff will not because they've imbibed the talking point of the government that these were domestic terrorists. But eventually, it's going to be harder for the government propaganda to not conflict with what they see around themselves in their own communities. And once those lies are very apparent and soon many, many people are going to know somebody who's who or know of someone who has been brutalized in some way or another by ICE or something has happened to them. And also the economy may deteriorate further. And so it's going to be harder to deny that what the government is saying and Trump's priorities of his ballroom and kidnapping Maduro, all these foreign policy things that he and he's not interested in them and affordability, it'll be harder to ignore. And so what you see, many of the case studies are long regimes, like almost like a one party state. And that's different. But it can take either a kind of rotting from within of the state due to corruption. And so what did we see in Russia is you had like hundreds of thousands of young men fleeing for the border because after the, quote, special military operation into Ukraine, because they knew very well that, you know, Russian military was not what it was supposed to be, and they would be cannon fodder, and they would die. So hundreds of thousands ran for the—they tried to get out of the country. And that's an example of people who were no longer believing the propaganda. So I think you're familiar with the doomsday clock of the Federation of American Scientists. That's where they speculate how close we are to nuclear Armageddon, and they say so many minutes until midnight, and they set that hand back or forward depending on how close we're coming to that nuclear precipice, that Armageddon. So if you had an authoritarian doomsday clock, how close are we to midnight with an authoritarian takeover and a collapse of our democracy? Where would you put the minute hand right now? You know, in some ways, it's tempting to say we're halfway there because a huge amount of damage has been done. And it depends what your metrics are. If the metric is the damage to government institutions like Department of Justice, the State Department, it's way beyond half. It's huge damage has been done. And foreign policy has been personalized. You see this with other autocrats, where these cronies and sons-in-law, you know, people who they're pushing out the foreign policy establishment. And so that that under that metric we quite a ways onward and also corruption of course being able to being able to hold the leader accountable and his cabinet ministers for corruption that is down the path And the other thing that notable about our situation is so much was done so quickly that there is no comparison to really any other leader who came into power via elections. If you look at the first year of Putin, Erdogan, And even Orban did a lot, but we're also the United States. And they also wrecked USAID. They did so many things for foreign policy. And when the U.S. does things, it reverberates around the world. So there is no other government that did outside of a coup where the effects within the country and globally were resonating so much as what we've been living through. Yes, I've made the statement, and I hate to trivialize this by comparing our president to a certain German leader in the 1930s, but it took the burning down of the Reichstag after Hitler was made chancellor. It really—Donald Trump is moving much more quickly in some respects. Yes. And that's very important. And the reasons for that, they had a shadow government in Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. They had Musk, who was the oligarch. You know, that's also, I think that right now the U.S. is a laboratory for a new form of authoritarianism. So you have classic things going on, capturing institutions, capturing media, you know, de facto paramilitary like ICE. But what happened with Musk was unheard of because the oligarch who helps the leader is supposed to be outside of government. That's how it's worked in Russia, in Modi. You know, they buy up banks or they buy up newspapers and then they ally. Here, Trump gave a private citizen, Musk, who's the richest in the whole world, to the ability to come in to the sensitive nerve centers of a superpower through Doge. And Doge was the mechanism to infiltrate and plunder the U.S. government. And my mouth was falling open that he was made a contemporary government employee. But this was just a ruse, let's say, of cover. And they were allowed to go in and sack all of the sensitive systems of payment and treasury systems. When is that where that happened? They locked out employees. They locked them out of their computers. It's like coup tactics. Really a different kind of coup, a 21st century coup. And that's also how things have happened so fast. Now, to finish answering your question, though, there's been an enormous amount of pushback that indicates that we still have a democracy in many respects, including inside institutions. There have been 300 successful legal cases decided on by judges, many of whom were appointed by Trump. So they have not been able to totally capture yet the judiciary the way that Erdogan and Orban have been able to do, and certainly Putin and people like that. And then you have all of the grassroots protests all over the nation. And you have organized things like No Kings that are building and building in numbers. And then you have all the spontaneous mobilizations that are very moving of people coming out. They're on their way home and they see somebody being brutalized by ICE and they drop their briefcase and go in or they are home and they're in their pajamas and they rush out the door. And that's going on all over the country. And then, you know, there's a lot of independent media like Substacks and we're all still able to speak out, perhaps more carefully, but we speak out. And so they have not managed to wreck the democratic, I would call it, public sphere. These are the guardrails of democracy. It shows a certain fairly high degree of resilience that we can hopefully recover. So we're not to the point where we can't recover. No. And I actually believe that I am an optimist by nature, which is a good thing given the people I study, because they're like the worst people in the world. And you've got to immerse yourself in their lives, and it's not pleasant. But I believe that one of my maxims is never underestimate the American people. And maybe because I'm a first generation American, I think that because Trump is engaging in overreach and he's making a lot of unforced errors and there is this thing called autocratic backfire. And one of the conditions that cause it and cause mass resistance and elite defections are corruption, like blatant corruption, like not even hiding it anymore. Um, overreach in terms of, uh, brutality for ordinary people, check, and then the creation of hardship and, and basically the government being very obvious that doesn't care. Does not, and of course, Trump doesn't care, uh, what happens to people. Um, and that's been evident forever. Well, you quoted him. You said that he said a while back he could shoot somebody and they wouldn't care. Yeah. And it's taken people. The thing is about America, with the great respect for the presidency, it's taken people a very long time to want to acknowledge how is it scary to how immoral and just uncaring Trump is. And I remember in 2020, during the pandemic, I went, I was interviewed and I said that Trump didn't care if you lived or died. He doesn't. None of them care. They're narcissists. They don't care. But this, I got a lot of hate mail or people were upset because it's too bleak. And we're used to, we've had good and less good presidents, but the office of the presidency has a prestige. and governance in a democracy has something to do with public welfare. And here we've got the whole point of our autocratic governance is totally different, has nothing to do with public welfare. It's about getting rich from office and consolidating power as much as possible so that nobody can come after you. And so it's taken, Americans didn't have a national precedent for this. And so that's been a hindrance, I would say, in a way. It's the strength of our country, but it's been a hindrance in terms of getting people to realize the extent of the danger. My adult children have asked me how we can overcome this slide, or maybe it's a plunge towards authoritarianism in America. Do you have any advice for young adults today, or any of our listeners for that matter, to how we can prevent this slide into this authoritarian state that you described so well in your book, Strong Men? I think that what we're living through now is a giant civics lesson. And I certainly see everything I'm doing as civic education about how precious our democratic rights are, how we're so privileged to have these rights. And one of the things I've learned from also talking to dissidents and just my own studies is that you use every tool and space that you have while you still have it. And that includes elections. I get emails from people who say, well, we're fascists now. This is a fascist state. So you can't vote your way out of fascism. And that is cynical because we still have elections and Democrats are racking up a lot of victories, and it's starting to rattle the Republican Party. And something could come of that later on. I agree. Yeah, I agree. We just elected a Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, here in Virginia, the new governor in New Jersey, I believe it is. This is encouraging to me, that all is not lost. It's going to continue. And so we have to, but there's millions and millions of people in America who either were detached from politics, took our liberties for granted. And so we have to reach those people and do registering people to vote That one avenue that we never give up on elections And we work actively if you want a phone bank whatever way You don't have to be in the streets protesting. There's many other things you can do. But working to to make people realize what the stakes are of of being detached right now. I agree. In fact, if you permit me, I'd like to read one quote that you wrote in your book, which I think is just beautiful. You say, there are two paths people can take when faced with the proliferation of polarization and hatred in their societies. They can dig their trenches deeper or they can reach across the lines to stop a new cycle of destruction. Knowing that solidarity, love and dialogue are what the strong man most fears. History shows the importance of keeping hope and faith in humanity and supporting those who struggle for freedom in our own time. We can carry with us the stories of those who lived and died, as just happened in Minnesota, over a century of democracy's destruction and resurrection. That's precious counsel for us today. Those are beautiful words, Ruth, and I think it's wonderful advice. Thank you. Yeah, it was like a journey to write the book, and it was not easy at times to write that book. Well, it was written four years ago. It was written during the first Trump administration. I know. And but what I came away is that the answer to the hatred is for us to prioritize the values of empathy and kindness and community. And so it's been all over the world when people have built a nonviolent resistance. And it's very, very important that it be nonviolent and come together to help each other when the government doesn't care or is actively becoming a hostile force. So we we have a lot more agency and authoritarians want us to think that we're hopeless and they want us to be helpless or think that we're helpless. And so coming together and embodying the values that are the opposite of the strongman brand is something that's very important. Yes, absolutely. I noticed that the book is all about strong men, but I didn't notice any mention of strong women. Is there a reason for that, do you think? Is this a testicular trait? I mean, I have a chapter on machismo, and it's one of the first books to really put machismo up there along with propaganda and corruption and violence as a tool of rule. And I didn't include somebody like Thatcher or Gandhi because I wanted to really focus on people who really wrecked a democracy completely and became dictatorial figures. Now, today, though, we have the book was written before Meloni came to power. And I do think it's it is significant that she is the first female prime minister in Italy. It's a huge deal. But she was a neo-fascist and her mentors were Mussolini, who there were many videos of her salute, making fascist salutes in her youth. And also Berlusconi, who are both famous serial rapists and just, you know, beyond misogynistic. And so she, yes, she's breaking the glass ceiling, but she's highly homophobic. She espouses great replacement theory. She's friends with Musk. Her domestic policies are, her foreign policy is more moderate. Her domestic policies are a lot of recycling of what Berlusconi did. So women can come to power even for the first time, but they have, in a way, internalized ideologies that don't serve women well. I'm going to conclude this discussion with another quote in your book. Your book is beautifully written, and I love this. Democracy needs heroes more than ever and compelling narratives that make the case for the merits and advantages of open societies. Liberal values don't have to seem tepid and boring, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues. If compassion and love are recognized as fundamental to the democratic model of politics, too often we have left the work of shaping emotions, including patriotism and our love for our country to democracy's enemies. Why should MAGA have a monopoly on what we claim to be patriotism and support of America? I mean, making America great again, America has always been great, but they are diluting it seriously. And now we have somebody in power who is, I believe, working with the enemies of America and trying to wreck. If you look at what's gone on and they've wrecked, it's like as though there's a holistic plan. They're a bit too chaotic to really have a holistic plan, although Project 2025 people did. But to take away or wreck or defund everything that brought America trust and prosperity in the world, from humanitarian assistance to medical research to, you know, international collaborations, all of it has to be wrecked. And it's a really scary thing that's going on because who's going to prosper? And I guess a good ending point is Trump campaigned on this in 2024 in June, I believe it was, in a campaign rally. He said, if you have a smart president, they don't have to be enemies. You'll make them do great. And he was referring to China, Russia and North Korea. Incredible. Incredible. Well, thank you so much, Ruth, for joining us today. Tell the audience again where they can find you in your work to resist authoritarianism. And we'll post the link, but please tell them about that. So I published a lot of my writing. I publish a newsletter on Substack called Lucid, and it's about threats to democracy and authoritarianism. And I have weekly for paying subscribers. I have weekly Q&As where you can ask me and my guests questions directly. I also write for The New York Times sometimes. and the author of Strongman and working on a book about resistance now. I was going to ask you if you were going to update Strongman in light of what we're going through now, but if you're working on another book and resistance, I think that would be wonderful. I look forward very much to reading that. So thank you again, Ruth, for being on our show today. And anyways, if you like what you heard on today's show, please subscribe to the Steady State Sentinel wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star review on Google. These subscriptions and five stars help us to get this important content to the widest audience possible. The Steady State Sentinel is for you, our listeners, and we want to hear from you. So stay informed, stay engaged, and join us next week for another episode of the Steady State Sentinel. For the Steady State Sentinel, Jim Lawler, still standing watch. Thank you for listening to the Steady State Sentinel podcast. Don't miss out on more insights and exposés from America's premier global security experts. Also, subscribe to our Substack at substack.com slash at SteadyState1. And follow our social media. And join us right here next week for another exciting edition. The Steady State is a non-profit organization working to sustain our democracy and national security. Join us and support our mission by visiting www.thesteadistate.org. Thank you.
