Strongmen

A historian traces roughly a century of authoritarian rulers—from Mussolini and Hitler, through the Cold War coups of figures like Pinochet, to today's elected strongmen such as Putin, Berlusconi, Erdoğan, and Trump—and argues they run variations on a single playbook.

She organizes the tools that recur across eras: the cult of the virile, indispensable leader; nationalism and the promise to restore a lost greatness; propaganda and the deliberate corruption of information; and corruption as a system—looting and patronage that tie loyalists' fortunes to the leader's survival.

Violence and machismo run through all of it, from paramilitary intimidation to the strongman's performance of hyper-masculinity as a claim to rule. Ben-Ghiat shows how the techniques evolved as open dictatorship gave way to authoritarianism dressed in democratic clothing.

Crucially, she also studies how strongmen fall—through the overreach, isolation, and loss of control their own style makes likely—arguing their grip is more brittle than it looks, and that exposing corruption and refusing to play along with the spectacle are among the ways they end.

For authoritarians, only some people are "the people," regardless of their birthplace or citizenship status, and only the leader, above and beyond any institution, embodies that group.— Strongmen