After Donald Trump was indicted for the third time, the hot-takes industry enjoyed another brief boomlet. The takes were out in full force. But I craved something different — someone who could unspool for me what this historic moment means in the larger contest between democracy and authoritarianism in American life.
So I called Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one the country’s leading scholars of authoritarianism, author of the incisive book STRONGMEN, and creator of the newsletter Lucid.
I asked her to situate the news this week in the larger context of the authoritarian menace to America at present and to reflect on what anti-authoritarians in high office and in everyday life can do to resist the threat. You won’t want to miss this one.
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A conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat
THE INK: What was your reaction when you heard that this third indictment — by all accounts, the most serious and the one cutting closest to the bone of democracy and authoritarianism — had come through?
BEN-GHIAT: First, it made me very moved that we still have a democracy, because this indictment could never happen in many countries around the world. And the fact that it ends by talking about how it’s about protecting the individual’s right to vote, that’s very significant.
The other reaction was that I was very glad that a lot of the indictment is a story about him lying. In fact, I had just published a piece in my Substack, Lucid, about how Trump has been underestimated as a propagandist. We like to see him as a clown or just disorganized or lazy, and instead he’s had enormous success.
THE INK: Say more about that underestimation. I fall into that trap myself, even though I’m aware that there’s a cunning quality to it, into the notion that he’s a clown, a buffoon, incompetent, probably doesn’t know where his keys are. What are we getting wrong?
BEN-GHIAT: He is those things. However, if we start by thinking of him as an authoritarian, we have to realize that he was very competent at the things he cared about. He did not care about public welfare, about governance as it’s been traditionally defined by either Republican or Democratic presidents.
Trump is qualitatively different from anybody who ever occupied the White House, and his goal was to use public office to make money. And he did that. He visited a Trump-branded property one out of every three days while he was in the office in the White House. The other thing he really worked at very ceaselessly was propagandizing, both to create a leader cult and to turn the public against all of the institutions that could harm him.
And he started this in 2016, actually. He started trying to tell the public that our elections were corrupt in 2016. The reason so many people believed the Big Lie is that he had been priming them for years to believe it.
THE INK: This new indictment really centers on the spreading of lies. Can you talk about the centrality of lying and how you read the indictment as a scholar of authoritarianism?
BEN-GHIAT: As the authoritarian leader, you have to turn public attention and opinion away from the media; you have to deposit that trust in you and you alone. And that’s why personality cults are important. And I have a line in my book, STRONGMEN, that says they believe him because they believe in him. The reason Trump started very early to reach out to people and hold rallies and have these loyalty oaths is that he knew that if they didn’t have that unshakable devotion to him, the lies would not be believed. Once these bonds form and the loyalty is there, it’s very hard to break them.
THE INK: In grade school, many of us were raised on the theory that a free press prevents this kind of propaganda spread. You have that old quote from Thomas Jefferson saying that if he had a choice between democracy and a free press, he’d choose the free press because you’d end up with a democracy. That’s such a deep article of faith. Do we need to reconsider it in light of recent history?
BEN-GHIAT: No, but when you have forces that come together, as they did with Trump, around a demagogue, and you have a very skilled demagogue, and that demagogue has partners like Fox News — Fox is a co-author of everything that’s happened, and they had a symbiotic relationship. And he also had all of the GOP, which he domesticated very quickly. These are authoritarian dynamics where Fox became the de facto propaganda arm, the GOP converted into an autocratic party working within a democracy. When you have that, and you have the power of Trump with his charisma and his ability and his ceaseless labor at repeating these lies, then you can achieve that even with a free press.
THE INK: Right now, one man is facing indictment for this act of defrauding, but what you just mentioned is a giant corporation as a co-author. We’ve already seen the Dominion civil lawsuit. Do you think there should be further civil or criminal or other types of legal sanction for Fox News’s role in co-authoring the mass deception and conspiracy you’re talking about?
BEN-GHIAT: I do think they should have some penalty to pay for knowingly spreading lies. In the indictment and the discussions about it, one of the issues has been, how does one prove Trump knew that what he was spreading was lies? Was he doing it knowingly? Well, because of the Dominion lawsuit, we have proof that the Fox hosts who were spreading democracy-destroying lies knew they were lies. And some of them hated Trump and they were still doing this.
The one thing that haunts me is that, for a brief moment, Rupert Murdoch had the idea to stop the election denying and have all of the major hosts who were loved, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham and all of them, come together on air and say that the election had not been stolen. He had that idea, and he circulated it, and then they had too much at stake and the opposite happened.
THE INK: That would’ve been the worst family reunion ever…
BEN-GHIAT: But it would’ve saved things. And this was before January 6.
THE INK: There’s this recent line that I’m sure you’ve heard from Trump, and it’s a darkly effective line. He says to his audiences, “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”
It’s, at one level, completely nonsensical. And yet, rhetorically, it does seem to have a certain power. Can you interpret and explain that line to me based on your study of authoritarianism?
BEN-GHIAT: It’s actually one of the things that worries me the most right now, because all authoritarians are victims. They have victimhood cults. It’s extremely important because their aggression must always be presented as self-defense, and any prosecution of their corruption must be presented as persecution. That’s a theme of strongmen.
At some point, though, it’s not enough to paint yourself as the only victim. For example, after the midterms, when Trump’s extremist candidates didn’t do well and his power was a bit shaky and Murdoch was temporarily turning away from him, people could conclude, Well, this guy’s just got too much baggage. So they don’t buy the victimhood thing anymore; they get tired of it.
So what he did — this is, again, how he’s a superb propagandist — is he started saying “I’m the victim, but the real target is you” to the public. “They’re really going after you, and I’m just standing in the way.” Why is this worrying to me? It’s not just renewing the bonds so that they feel tethered to him because he can save them: “I’m standing in the way and I’m the savior of you.” We also know from the history of fascism that if you want people to engage in violence on your behalf, you have to get them to feel personally threatened.
THE INK: I want to ask you about each of the two major political parties and their posture as this happens.
So first the Democrats. I don’t know if you saw this book by a former colleague of mine, Roger Cohen, called AN AFFIRMING FLAME. Roger has long written about this contest between democracy and authoritarianism. And in this new book summing up what he’s learned about this contest, he said something that really bothered me and I somewhat disagreed with, and we had a good debate about it. He said these kind of authoritarian, hate-fueled, fascistic movements inherently have an advantage — that they’re better at getting the blood up. They’re better at making people feel things. And the reason it bothered me was the idea that this is somehow inherent in these awful movements. I don’t believe it’s inherently the case that small-d democratic movements cannot be exciting to people or cannot compete in terms of offering a thrilling, galvanizing project.
But maybe I’m wrong. And I’m curious: Do you think the Democratic Party, in an age of right-wing authoritarianism, needs to try to compete on the level of sentiment and excitement and emotion?
BEN-GHIAT: I agree with you. This is not inherent at all. I learned a lot from your book, THE PERSUADERS, which is a lot about this and will be part of my new book that I’m working on. I think that Democrats can learn something from, not the hatred, but from the way the right has been able to create these communities of belonging and make people feel that they are cared for.
Now, in the case of people like Trump, it’s all a lie. He tells them he loves them, he uses emotion and all autocrats use emotion very carefully and very well, but for bad reasons. So I say, how amazing could it be if people who really did care about people used emotion? And the other thing is that Democrats can and should get people fired up about the excitement and the promise and the success of multiracial democracy.
THE INK: Let’s say we appointed you Joe Biden’s chief advisor on combating authoritarianism, and you needed to come up with specific things that the vision you just articulated translates into. How would you think about making democracy exciting at a practical level?
BEN-GHIAT: I think, one, we have to reclaim from the right the idea of freedom, the freedom to be who we want to be, which has been branded as wokeism or identity politics. But this is the beauty and the freedom to be who you want to be and succeed in the world. So freedom links to success, to prosperity.
Also, reclaiming love of country. And love and care. You know who I have my eye on? John Fetterman, who not only was able successfully to go after white-working-class, rural voters. But he also has been exhibiting an anti-authoritarian masculinity in a way that matters. Because right now, we’re in a new round of traditional masculine fetish, with Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson and others on the right. And John Fetterman is saying it’s OK to be strong and also vulnerable.
THE INK: Here’s a question that’s a crossover between the “Barbie” movie and Trumpism. One of the many striking ideas in that movie is that men are lost right now behind the mask of apparent bravado and strength. Tens of millions of men are lost between old and new ways of being. Can you talk about the crisis of masculinity as an atmospheric condition that makes authoritarianism more probable?
BEN-GHIAT: So STRONGMEN was, as far as I know, one of the first books on this subject to have a chapter on masculinity and elevate it as a tool of rule on the same level as corruption and propaganda and violence, because they all fit together. I felt that people weren’t taking masculinity seriously. What I’ve found is that authoritarians appeal at moments in history when societies have gone through a lot of change. Worker rights have been gained, racial emancipation has occurred. But it’s also when males feel their status and authority are threatened. Now in the Euro-American context, it’s white males, but this is not just a white thing. This is in fact the through line of authoritarianism, wherever the heck it is. It’s homophobia and hyper-masculinity.
THE INK: Now I want to ask you about the Republican Party. You’re starting to see the 2024 primary start to take hold. Different candidates announcing, different candidates carving out lanes, although most of the lanes are relatively similar. But you do have Mike Pence making a statement this week that no one indicted for things like this should be allowed to run. When you look at all of those Republican postures, do you see even hairline fractures within the Republican coalition of some people trying to carve out a non-authoritarian lane in the GOP? Or as you look at it, is the full scope of the Republican Party monolithically an authoritarian party at this point?
BEN-GHIAT: It’s more the latter. I see fear, I smell fear. Remember that, in 2022, the GOP official statement said that January 6 was “legitimate political discourse.” If a party views a violent coup attempt as legitimate political discourse, it has accepted the methods of a coup as part of its political menu.
THE INK: So, right now, you have a former president who breaks laws the way I drink coffees. You have a Justice Department that is finally, belatedly willing to hold him to account. But you also have this very, very large number of people, tens of millions of people, who do not believe he’s a criminal, do not believe the facts of these cases. Even as these prosecutions rack up and you see prosecutors willing to actually bring cases, does it matter that there’s this very large popular constituency out there? Is it part of the project of prosecutors to deal with that mass public opinion problem. Is that not their job?
BEN-GHIAT: It’s the job of prosecutors to use the instrument of the law, and they’ve been very careful, and that’s their job. They can’t persuade people who have fallen under the thrall of a cult leader. But it’s all the more important to have these indictments. One thing when you study other countries, we are the outlier not because we have these indictments and these cases. We’re the outlier because the object of them is the frontrunner for a presidential nomination. That’s very unusual.
THE INK: When you’re thinking about tens of millions of people in the grips of this leader cult, it evokes for many on the left a profound despair and sense of hopelessness around how can you win back people who have seceded from reality. And yet despair is not going to rescue us from this situation. How do you think about the project of winning people back from the leader cult?
BEN-GHIAT: A lot of the things that Biden is doing, which are these big structural changes, are designed to address some of the root causes that lead people to feel despairing economically or in other ways. But at the level of what all of us can do, as distasteful as it may seem, this is when bridge-building is very important, and we really can’t give up on that.
This is the time to reach out. Everyone seems to have somebody who is in what I call the disinformation tunnel. My mother was radicalized. She lives in England. She was radicalized from watching Russia Today, the Kremlin propaganda organ, during the pandemic, and she started praising Putin. And so I have regular calls with her.
Every expert on this, whether they come from disinformation studies or cult studies, will tell you that if the person already knows you well and trusts you, you have to keep up the relationship and find common ground on other things. And you keep the relationship because if you cut them off, cast them off, they go deeper into their tribe.
THE INK: So how did this apply in these conversations with your mother? Tell us very practically, what are you doing with your mother and what works and what does not work?
BEN-GHIAT: Well, it doesn’t work to lecture. I have a thing where I call it exposing the device. It does not work if they say fact A, and you know it’s fake, and you say, “Mom, that’s not right, here’s fact B.” Because it becomes tit for tat. What I try to do is rise above, exposing the device, like, “Do you know why Trump or whoever is saying fact A? It’s because there’s this larger thing.” And sometimes that gets them out of their groove, because they’ve been stuck in these narrative grooves and you have to shake them out of it.
The other thing is that you can’t be condescending and you have to go in from the side. Sometimes raising issues from an unexpected angle, throwing them off their agendas.
THE INK: This is a point that I feel conflicted about personally. At a civic level, and as someone who thinks and writes about democracy, what you’re saying feels elemental. But a lot of people reading this will also say, “Hold on. I don’t don’t want to go call racist relatives who are ranting about things. I don’t want to call people who make me feel unsafe.”
You’re familiar with that as well as someone who teaches and is around young people who have ideas about this that are different from that of older generations. And so this idea of going into the public square and lovingly building bridges with people who are part of this leader cult is also very controversial, as you know.
So how do you think about the tension between Someone’s got to do this work and No one should have to?
BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, it’s not for everyone. For example, if you’re gay and your parents think you should just burn in hell and they’ve cast you off, it is highly dangerous and upsetting to your mental health to engage with them. So we have to practice self-care and self-protection. There are times where I didn’t talk to my mother for a month because I couldn’t take it. It’s very difficult. But I do know that if we all just give up on it and we don’t even try, even those of us who could take it a little bit and are not existentially threatened by these people – that’s not going to be good for democracy, either. That’s all I can say on that.
THE INK: One of the things that I want to do with The Ink now is to not just reflect back to people a picture of their society that makes them angry but also help people answer this question of what they can do. So besides this notion of talking to people in your life, which is obviously a very powerful thing, I wonder, in your study of authoritarianism and resistance to authoritarianism, what are other actions people can take locally or things ordinary people could sign up to do this afternoon? What are things people can do to help immunize their society against authoritarian threats?
BEN-GHIAT: That’s the major question. I think showing up. One of the biggest tools is nonviolent protest. That could mean, at a local level, showing up at school board meetings, at town councils. Because we all know the strategy of the GOP, and now fused with extremists like the Proud Boys, is to take over these places. It’s not without danger, because there are now Proud Boys on school boards and stuff; these are violent people. But one of the major goals of authoritarians is to make you so intimidated that you self-censor, and that also means you become invisible.
I know there are people who think we can’t out-vote voter suppression, but I think that that’s not a constructive viewpoint. I’m haunted by all the people who didn’t vote in the last election, tens of millions of them.
THE INK: The subject we’ve been talking about can be a depressing one. When you look around the country or the world, what gives you hope right now? Are there seeds anywhere, projects, ideas, efforts, that give you hope that people should know more about?
BEN-GHIAT: We are in a global renaissance of anti-authoritarian action. All over the world there are mass protests — either they’re the biggest that country has ever had, or the biggest that the country has had in many decades. Or places where it’s so dangerous, like Iran and China. It’s all over the world. And it’s not only younger people, but the younger generation does feel existentially threatened from climate, from economic insecurity, from war, and, in our country, from gun violence.
I’m very hopeful that a new anti-authoritarian age can be dawning, even though, especially in our country right now, it may seem impossible.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.