November 12, 2024 • 60 mins
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and the threats these present to democracies around the world.
Her most recent book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, looks at how illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, violence, and machismo, and how they can be defeated.
She writes for CNN, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She has appeared in many documentaries about dictators and threats to democracy, such as Netflix’s How To Become a Tyrant and PBS’s The Dictators’ Playbook.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy
(00:03):
and the Rule of Law Speaker Series,
presented by Democracy First.
Join us for a conversation with historian Ruth Ben-Giott.
Ruth is a leading scholar on fascism and authoritarianism
and the author of Strongman, from Mussolini to the present.
Journalist and national correspondent for the nation,
John Nichols, moderated this conversation
(00:24):
in Madison, Wisconsin.
Today, the former president of the United States,
and by the way, we're not here just,
this is about a lot more than Donald Trump.
And this is about a lot more than where the Republican Party is
or the Democratic Party at this point.
But we'll do a little bit of Trump to kind of get perspective
on some of what's going on here.
(00:45):
Today, the former president of the United States gave a speech.
And he was talking about mass deportations and suggesting
that the mass deportations of immigrants would begin
in Springfield, Ohio.
And he used some words in that speech
that were very familiar to you as a scholar of fascism,
(01:09):
or at least as a scholar of strongmen and authoritarians.
So why don't we begin, why don't we put this speech
in perspective a little bit and then we'll grow from there.
Yeah. Thanks for, thanks everybody for coming.
It's delighted to see you.
Thank you.
And it's just very disturbing to hear Trump speaking
(01:33):
like using this language of dehumanization.
What, you know, he's a very successful
and careful propagandist.
And one of the lines he's been following for years is choosing
certain groups of people, and this is immigrants now,
to dehumanize.
(01:53):
And he has called them vermin, which is language
that Mussolini used and Hitler used.
And also, you know, communists,
like he's called people scum.
These are, these are kind of, it goes beyond left
or right, authoritarians.
He talked about, you know, some time ago when he started this,
(02:13):
he talked about these people who were like hiding,
who have to be rooted out.
And this is also the language of, you know,
you have to, they're like, they're like insects or animals
and you have to find them and exterminate them really.
He doesn't, he doesn't fill in the rest of the sentence.
So today he used the word nests.
So this is again, so we have, you know, we have vermin,
(02:37):
nests, I mean, it's pretty explicit.
And he's twinning this and he's saying this to not just,
it's not just getting people to hate immigrants.
It's, I believe that he's been doing this
to condition Americans, to accept the chaos
and the violence that will come if he gets back
to the White House and he actually starts
(02:59):
these mass deportations.
And the thing I wanna say about those is, you know,
they're talking 10, 15 million people.
And in his time interview, he actually said 15
to 20 million people.
So let's take 15.
That is on the school of Hitler,
(03:19):
of in terms of numbers of people.
It's on the school, it's on the, sorry, the scale.
It's on the scale of Stalin.
It's like the old school dictator population re-engineering.
And it's more than the population of Sweden,
15 million people, or of Cuba, or of Indonesia,
or of Belgium.
(03:40):
And how is this going to happen?
They're gonna be, an infrastructure has to be built.
And so the last thing I'll say is,
when you build an infrastructure of repression,
you may be building it for one group,
but it's then there and it's used for others.
And an example is, when the Nazis built Dachau in 1933,
(04:03):
they didn't build it for Jews.
They had run out of room with the prisons
and they were storing people in warehouses
and they had to get something more official.
They were going after leftists and liberals,
socialists, communists, liberals.
And once it was built, other people, LGBTQ people,
all kinds of Jehovah's Witnesses,
(04:25):
all these other categories went in there
because it was there.
Even people with disabilities, ultimately.
That's right.
So think about what a deportation on the scale
would mean in terms of spaces, in terms of chaos,
sweeps at people's homes.
The United States is really gonna look like,
(04:46):
knocks at the door.
All the tropes of authoritarian horror
will be widespread if the number is 15 million.
It boggles the mind.
And so I just wanna, there's a link
between using this language and these plans.
(05:07):
And...
Not very light places to start out.
That's John's fault.
I blame myself.
But it's exactly where I wanna start
because I think it's important to start
in the heart of what we're talking about
and then we can begin to unpack it a little
and think about where we're at.
I wanna unpack one other thing too,
that we're still in the shadow,
the cusp of the debate between Kamala Harris,
(05:31):
a black woman who is the child of Jamaican
and Indian immigrants to this country,
and Donald Trump, former president of the United States,
businessman, reality TV star.
They had their debate and most of us watched it
in the context of contemporary politics.
(05:53):
But you saw things.
We talked a little bit about this last night.
You saw a whole bunch of things in that debate
that relate very much to your scholarship on strong men.
And so I'm glad to prompt you on a few of them,
but I particularly interested in the fact
that here was someone who you identify as a strong man
or an aspiring strong man,
(06:16):
encountering a woman and a woman who is in a position
of power.
So why don't we begin talking about that a little bit?
I'm actually, on the way here,
I was working on a piece from a newsletter.
I have a sub-stack newsletter, Loosid.
And the essay is called,
When the Strong Man, in quotes, meets a strong woman.
(06:36):
And, you know, Strong Men, you'll find,
has a chapter on masculinity.
It's called, Virility in the Book.
And it's the first book to elevate Machismo
to a tool of rule alongside propaganda,
corruption, violence.
Because it's so important to the identity
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and the public persona of this type of leader.
And so one of the things you find
is when they're confronted by women who are their equals,
they just can't, they can't handle it.
And so they either pretend that the person really,
you know, they won't do the rituals to recognize.
(07:22):
So they, so we didn't wanna shake her hand.
She had to stride over and shake his hand.
But I was reminded of, and part of it's in my book,
Angela Merkel, who met Trump in 2017.
And what did she do?
Chancellor of Germany, and at that point,
often spoken of as sort of the leader of the Western world.
(07:44):
Yeah, one of the most powerful women in the world.
And what did he do?
He pretended she wasn't there.
He refused to shake her hand.
He pretended, he ignored her,
pretended he didn't hear her.
And then let's say, you're Merkel,
he just, he was like scowling.
(08:05):
And he just ignored her.
Because he didn't wanna relate.
And Angela, so my essay is about Angela Merkel,
who also had to deal with Putin,
who insulted her and unleashed his dog near here
because she had a fear of dogs.
And then Angela Merkel had to deal with Bear Lusconi,
and both of these people would make her wait for hours.
(08:28):
Or they would talk on the phone in front of her.
So basically, the strongman can,
he's so threatened that it brings out
infantile and fragile behaviors to make the,
you have to put the woman down to inflate your own ego.
And it's not original behavior, but that's what they do.
And so when I saw the debate,
(08:50):
and the way he also took her bait,
he couldn't help himself.
Because she was kind of treating him
without the regard that he is always treated with.
In fact, people still think he's the rightful president.
He has created a fictional world
(09:10):
that tens of millions of people
believe he won the 2020 election.
And they treat him as though he's still the president.
And some of the media gives him this deference,
despite him being a convicted felon
and all the other things we know.
So he's been able actually to continue
to inhabit this fictional world.
(09:32):
And in comes Kamala Harris and punctures it.
And he doesn't know what to do,
because nobody has done that to him so frontally.
So it's an extremely interesting moment
in terms of power, leadership, and gender.
Do you think Kamala Harris is aware
(09:54):
of some of the things you're talking about?
Oh yes.
I think, I mean, what I read
and what democratic politicians, Jared Moskowitz,
and others that they planned for this,
they planned to get to bait him,
to make him speak inanities,
to get him riled up so that he would show his unsuitability.
(10:20):
And it worked, because he couldn't contain himself.
He often can't contain himself.
It's not just with her.
But on that occasion, because this is also why
he keeps talking about as though Biden
were still his adversary.
He didn't wanna give up this idea of Biden
because Biden he could handle.
(10:40):
Kamala Harris, the prosecutor, who's not afraid of him,
this is what gets them unhinged.
And Angela Merkel, she was not afraid of Putin.
And Harris is not afraid of Trump.
And these are bullies.
And everyone around them, the most powerful GOP senators,
(11:01):
they all acquiesce, they all are intimidated,
at least publicly they act like they are.
And they bolster his ego.
And so he has this kind of just sycophants around him.
So they don't know how to handle other types of people.
That's what we saw.
(11:22):
The strong man in the Western world
is usually associated with a political party.
And is it fair to say, and you helped me with this,
is it fair to say that the political party
must become a cult of personality?
And if indeed that's the case,
is that perhaps why Donald Trump had such a hard time
(11:46):
imagining that Joe Biden would give up
the leadership of the Democratic Party
because it was impossible for him to imagine
surrendering that,
surrendering that control of a political organization,
not recognizing perhaps that the other party
wasn't a cult of personality?
I think so, but I think with Trump with Biden,
(12:08):
it was just very convenient for Trump to have Biden there.
Partly because as you saw,
the press was very interested in Biden's age
and state of his cognitive capabilities.
And that was keeping Trump's problems from being treated.
(12:32):
And that's just how it was.
There was an imbalance there.
And so it was convenient for Trump to have Biden there.
And he had better chance of winning with Biden there.
So I think that's why.
But the party, but this is the drama.
The party is what has happened to the GOP.
(12:52):
If you look at it, so what I do is,
I'm not an expert in US history,
although I born here, I grew up here.
I grew up here, I look at the GOP,
which frankly before 2016,
I didn't pay that much attention to the GOP.
And I look at it with the eyes of global autocracy.
So if you wanna track a party that is becoming autocratic,
(13:16):
the checklist is everything that has happened to the GOP.
It's a party that when a party is going autocratic,
there is no dissent allowed.
There literally becomes a party line.
You don't have to be in a style
in a dictatorship to have a party line.
Those who do not follow the party line are,
(13:37):
they're not, again, they're not purged and put in prison,
although Mike Pence had a gallows
on January 6th waiting for him.
But so the outcomes are different,
but you are not allowed to have any dissent.
And the tone and the priorities of the party
are set by the leader.
And so a very important concept is personalization of power.
(14:01):
And so everybody in my book is a personalist ruler.
And what this means is that the personal and private,
legal, financial, and other needs of the leader
come to set the tone for the party.
And it happened in Berlusconi's Italy.
It happened in all the cases I discussed.
So, example, the Republican National Convention,
(14:24):
a committee, rather, it has been paying
Trump's personal legal bills for a long time.
It stopped for a while and then it started again.
And who is the head of the RNC?
Lara Trump.
You always, personalist rulers always appoint
their family members as part of the inner circle
(14:44):
because then the corruption can be hidden more easily.
And so we had Jared Kushner and Ivanka
and now we have Lara Trump.
So the party has become an appendage
of Trump's personal problems.
And what is its main goal or main agenda of this party
is to solve Trump's problems,
is to get him back to power so he can make himself whole
(15:08):
financially and his legal problems can go away.
So, and that's why already in the 2020 campaign,
the Republican party didn't have any platform.
They declined to issue a platform beyond support of Trump.
So this is when I look at all these things
and I look at the journey of the GOP
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and what happens to people who transgress,
like Liz Cheney, who Trump wants to said he'd like
to have a televised military tribunal for her.
It's a bit of an authoritarian thing.
That's what like Gaddafi used to do.
So when I look at all of this journey of the party,
I see a party that's become in its function
(15:53):
and its structure an autocratic party.
And we don't like that here
because the party is found in Wisconsin.
And so we have a certain sense of connection to it.
And also that I say that somewhat in a somewhat
jacquely way, but truthfully,
I think a lot of people have a sense of connection to it.
(16:15):
There's a sense of, and so what's going on here
is complicated because it isn't just
about the development of a new party or something like that.
This is a party with deep roots
and deep history in the country.
But does that not also,
when you become the candidate of a party,
that's a very empowering thing
in the American political system
(16:37):
because we have this duopoly.
And so if you are the leader of one party,
our media sees you in a certain way,
our political class in general sees you in a certain way.
And I would argue that a substantial portion of voters
see you beyond what they like or dislike about you,
that you are a part of something that they know
(16:57):
or something their family's deeply rooted in.
So that is a somewhat of a variation
from some other countries as regards
the rise of a strongman.
It's many other countries of multi-party system.
And in the past, Americans were like,
oh, those countries are so confused.
It's so easy to make the government's fall.
(17:19):
We're stable because we just have our bipartisan thing.
But what happens if one of the two parties
makes the journey I just described?
And now when I'm talking about it becoming autocratic,
I don't mean that the average Republican voter
doesn't want democracy anymore.
I'm talking about the leadership
(17:39):
and the way it's functioning at the highest levels.
But although it has affected who's in the party
at the local and state level,
the denial of, you know,
it's not just Matt Gaetz who's refusing to say
whether he will accept the outcome of the election
in order to be in the party.
You have to be saying that at every level.
(18:02):
So, you know, but now it's a bit of a liability
in our country to have the bipartisanship.
And I'll give you an example.
In Italy, which is a country I study,
in 2019 there's this very thuggish guy,
Matteo Salvini, the head of a far-right party.
And it seemed like he could,
(18:24):
he was on track to become prime minister.
It would have been a nightmare.
He would go around with his t-shirt saying
how much he loved Putin.
So all the other parties,
even parties that didn't like each other,
got together and made a coalition
and made sure that he did not succeed.
(18:44):
So that was called, it's called gatekeeping.
So the extremist is not allowed to prevail
because everybody else goes together.
We can't do that, because we just have the two parties.
And it's a terrible shame, you know,
and it's a drama for people.
If you're a Republican and you don't,
you're not MAGA and you don't think January 6
(19:06):
was an insurrection and violent,
you're buying the other line,
you don't have a home.
It's really sad.
And so I've been involved with a lot of bipartisan initiatives
and I've written about Republicans for Harris.
So these, and all the people who are speaking out
who are trusted authorities,
(19:27):
who cannot be accused of being, you know,
like bleeding heart liberals,
and they're not, and they're all for Harris.
And they're not asking people to become Democrats.
They're asking people to put country before party,
that's one of the slogans,
this time on this occasion,
and vote for Harris because it's the best thing
(19:49):
for the country right now,
because of the state of the GOP.
So we're in, so I see these things as positive,
not because I don't want Trump to get in
because I don't want a dictatorship here,
but also because it's evidence of a flexibility
that's emerging in our quite rigid and fossilized
(20:11):
bipartisan system.
Things are happening.
And there's actually a lot of stuff happening.
We just don't, the media is not focusing on it.
There's tons of bridge building,
there are coalitions, there's so much going on.
And I wish people knew,
I wish it was on page one, you know,
or top of the screen,
because it would help people to feel more hopeful
(20:34):
and less constrained by our circumstances.
And I think it's important to point out
for our conversation here,
though there are folks,
some of these Republicans for Harris and folks like that,
we're not here telling people how to vote.
And this is, we, I know what you're very focused on,
(20:54):
although you'll have your personal preferences,
but you're focused on teaching people
about the circumstance that we are in, right?
The moment that we are in and understanding it as such.
And I think that that is actually in many ways
a much more valuable contribution
than just yelling vote for somebody,
don't vote for somebody or something like that.
It is to bring some perspective to it.
That's why this nonpartisan group United to Preserve
(21:16):
and its allies have been out here
trying to open up these conversations
to give it some perspective.
Yeah, that's why I'm here.
Yeah.
Because I believe that this is a very valuable enterprise
and it's cross partisan, very, very important.
Because people want to also catalog you.
Like I'm very honored, I'm gonna be giving
(21:38):
the Bancroft lecture to the US Naval Academy
in a few weeks because I've written about military coups
or whatever, but you can imagine the mail I get,
like you're just a liberal, commie, you know,
and people's positions are much more nuanced, right?
And that's where the country, the patriotism comes in, right?
(22:02):
And I think cross partisan things right now
are so important because we are in an exceptional moment.
And this election is not a normal election.
It's really one of these things that historians study.
It's a turning point.
It's a critical juncture, as we often say.
It's going to be a referendum.
(22:22):
So yes, policy is important,
but it's not about policy primarily.
It's a referendum on the type of political system
we want to live in.
Because Trump is saying he wants to be a dictator
and he has been conditioning Americans
to think dictators are good.
I had my research assistant do it tally.
It's over 60 times in the last three years.
(22:44):
Trump has praised Putin, Xi, Kim.
I mean, the most murderous, horrible people,
like communist dictators, that's who he is
over and over and over holding up to the American people
as good leadership.
And so, and then you have the, you know,
he's not so fringe, but Tucker Carlson who says,
(23:06):
leadership means killing people.
Well, okay, if you're like Hitler, I guess it does.
But that's what we're dealing with.
So this is a, I see this election as a referendum
on who we want to be politically.
And in addition to United Preserve,
there's never groups that have co-sponsored
(23:27):
and have invited folks for your night.
And that's, I want to mention the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is that the wrong with applauding these groups?
Law forward, common cause in Wisconsin.
Leaders ethics, Wisconsin Interfaith
(23:50):
voter engagement campaign.
And the Wisconsin Conservation Voters.
And voices, I apologize, Wisconsin Conservation Voices.
And obviously you heard a little bit in the introduction
about the citizen promise and all these very important things
that are wrapped in here.
And they invited you because you've been working
(24:10):
in this area for a long time.
You're not a new arrival to this discussion group.
And so why don't you give us just a quick sense of how,
you know, like when you're, I presume there was an important
like four or five years old, you said, you know,
I think I'm going to devote my life to writing
about authoritarianism.
How did you come to be at this point,
(24:32):
one of the handful of people in the world who is thought
of as a real expert on this topic?
So I grew up in a totally improbable place
for studying like murderous dictators.
Pacific Palisades, California.
A beach town, very nice place.
(24:54):
A small town.
And my mother's from Scotland and she's Protestant
and my dad's Israeli, but from a Middle Eastern family.
So my grandmother is actually from the West Bank.
So what used to be called Palestinian Jew.
So, you know, a Sephardic Jewish family.
(25:14):
So I did not grow up hearing about the Holocaust.
I didn't grow up hearing about Mussolini.
But it turns out that my town and towns around it
were where a lot of famous exiles from nobbsism came.
Like Bertold Breck and Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg,
like, you know, famous people.
(25:35):
And maybe because I didn't have anyone,
any family members closer than a 13 hour plane ride away,
I, and my parents are immigrants, I'm first generation.
I started thinking like, what did it mean to somebody,
you know, you're doing your life in your country
and then some lunatic comes in and you have to leave
and start over halfway around the world.
(25:57):
And if you read Strongman, so I started thinking
when I was 16 years old, 15 years old about this.
And it turns out that Arnold Schoenberg, the composer,
his son was a teacher at my school.
He was a math teacher.
I was awful at math, so I never took his class.
But I started going to talk to him about this.
And he encouraged me to study it.
(26:18):
So when I went to UCLA, I did my senior thesis
on auto-climperer, the composer.
So I kept thinking about this stuff.
And then I decided to do Italy.
Somebody said to me, you know how these like very cat,
like a remark can just a casual remark.
Someone said, well, why don't you do Italy
because Mussolini lasted twice as long
(26:41):
and you know, there's not as much work done on it.
And I wanted to do like cultural political history.
So, and then I went to Rome and I took one look at Rome
and I was like, I'm doing Italy, right?
So that's how it started.
And I did, I was a regular academic
and did books on fascist Italy.
And I had started to write for CNN about historical things,
(27:04):
but I didn't have any, you know, that's all I was doing.
And then Trump came on the scene.
And in particular, you know, I started writing about
Bannon and white nationalism in the fall of 2015.
I started writing about guns.
It's very interesting to go back and think what,
what was catching my attention,
(27:26):
having studied fascism and thus violence.
And then Trump made the speech January, 2016.
I could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone.
And I wouldn't lose any followers.
If you study fascism, that was,
red flag is an understatement.
He was saying, he was doing many things that Duterte did,
(27:51):
Mussolini himself did.
He was associating himself with violence.
He was saying he was personally capable of violence
in public and he was saying that he'd be loved
or he wouldn't, he would be approved of
because of the violence, that's fascism.
So he seemed so dangerous that I started writing
(28:14):
for CNN about that.
I started giving interviews and I felt like
I had this skill set, I had this knowledge.
I seemed to be able to write for the public and speak.
So I started giving actually dozens and dozens
of interviews to journalists because I realized
that people in America didn't have a frame for,
(28:35):
it was like it can't happen here.
But nobody was using the word authoritarian.
Now it's everywhere or strong men.
But authoritarian was like people could hardly pronounce it
because it is a mouthful.
And I decided I had to start
by also educating the journalists.
So I took the time, I took all of their requests
(28:56):
and I talked to them and I had so many,
all the White House correspondents.
I was constantly in contact.
So I feel like I tried a lot of the times
it was behind the scenes to shape the knowledge
and the language that was used.
So that's how it all got started.
And then the TV and stuff came a bit later.
(29:18):
And one of the things that's striking is that you said,
well, I felt that folks didn't have a frame for it.
I think there's also, it's also true
that they didn't have a comfort level with saying it.
And so for a very long time,
I think probably years,
there was a discomfort with using the word strongman,
(29:38):
a discomfort with using the word authoritarian,
certainly a discomfort with using the word fascist.
And you saw that, you saw resistance to that,
not just in the media, which were certainly the case,
but also even in the political class,
even Democrats who might oppose
were very, very uncomfortable with going to these words.
It seems like now there's more of it.
(30:00):
What has happened?
Tell us, take us through that journey.
No, it's so interesting.
And I think very carefully about what language I use.
And the reason, of course, it's satisfying to say,
oh, so is a fascist.
And there are characters out there,
like Steve Bannon is a fascist,
just all of his ideologies, his style,
the way he sees politics.
(30:21):
Matt Gaetz, he's like getting there.
For example, he says things all the time
that are fascist things.
For example, he showed up at the Iowa State Fair this summer
where people are with their families,
they're eating their corn dogs,
and it was a Trump rally.
He shows up.
And he says this thing casually,
(30:43):
only force can bring change to a corrupt town
like Washington, DC.
I hear that, this is post January 6th, right?
Only force, like you're saying,
because what fascists believe is that violence
is the way you solve differences.
And violence is the way you push history forward,
the direct action stuff.
You don't use elections, you have violence.
(31:07):
And so he says things all the time.
But I also felt from the very beginning,
which is why in my book I don't call Trump a fascist,
I call him an authoritarian,
because Trump is just as enamored of Xi Jinping,
and he was funded by the Chinese,
like while he was president, and he's boasting about it.
(31:28):
Inside countries, left versus right matters a lot.
And we're in the middle of this right wing counter-revolution.
That's why Harris says we're not going back.
But at the biggest level, whether they're left or right,
like right now, Putin and Xi are allies.
One is far right and one is a communist.
(31:48):
What does that mean, right?
So Trump is an authoritarian.
He's transactional.
He will take money and he will take the playbook
from anybody.
He's sending love letters, he says, with Kim.
Kim's a communist.
So to call him a fascist misses part of the point,
(32:09):
that it's beyond that, it's about authoritarianism,
raw power, corruption, the whole playbook.
So that's why I choose that language.
And it was notable that in the debate the other day,
Victor Orban's name came up.
And I think a little shame on media there.
(32:30):
It is amazing to me that you can have
a national presidential debate.
And Victor Orban's name is mentioned
in a certainly positive context by one of the candidates.
And there's not a follow-up question.
He likes me.
He likes me.
But there wasn't a follow-up question on that.
Do you want to have, would you like the United States
to be more like Orban's Hungary?
(32:52):
It's a very easy question.
Yeah, you know, and I must say that Hungary has made quite
a name for itself under Orban.
And it is the model country for the Project 2025 in part.
When Orban comes to the States, he's done this repeatedly.
(33:15):
He's very involved in delegitimizing our democracy.
So he doesn't go to the White House.
Why should he go to the White House?
Even though you're supposed to do that,
if you're ahead of state, you're supposed to go to the White
House.
He goes to the Heritage Foundation,
his friend Kevin Roberts, and he goes to Mar-a-Lago
to kiss the ring.
And he's very much the model because he's
(33:38):
been so successful at what we call autocratic capture.
And yet, you don't hear about people falling out of windows
or being poisoned.
There's lots of threat that goes on.
There's all kinds of, in fact, what
I would have said at the debate if I had been there
and could have heckled that Hungary was just
(34:00):
ranked the most corrupt country in the EU.
And because that's what Orban is, he's a corrupt autocrat.
So that's, of course, Trump is going to think that's great.
I mean, that's his model.
And what people don't understand is that authoritarians are not
interested in governing in a democratic sense.
(34:20):
They couldn't care less about the welfare of the people.
They want to make money off of public office.
They want to amass as much power and never have to leave.
And they want total control of the message.
So they have different goals.
And when he cites Orban, that should
be where the knowledge goes.
(34:40):
But people still hesitate.
So we've been through the debate.
We've been through a lot of these different developments
of the moment.
Not long ago, you and Ben Het wrote an op-ed for the LA
Times.
And the title was somewhat provocative.
(35:01):
Would Trump stop free and fair elections?
Hitler and Mussolini's paths could be a clue.
What were you saying there?
Well, you don't choose your titles.
So you can give us that.
That's the oldest journalist excuse in the world, right?
Somebody else writes the headline.
(35:24):
Yeah, we wanted to focus on elections
because today there's this.
Well, this is the Orban model also, but also Turkey.
And today there's this thing, electoral autocracy,
where you don't have to get rid of elections totally
like the old school.
You keep them going.
(35:44):
And then you do things to society,
like domesticate the media.
You purge the election apparatus.
You purge the judiciary.
And the media is important because in the last Hungarian
election, most of the people never even
heard the message of the opposition candidate
(36:06):
because Orban has domesticated 90% of the media.
And that's happened here, too, with Fox and Sinclair now.
And people don't hear the message.
Now, the judiciary works with elections.
And because, for example, in 2020, over 60 judges
(36:26):
turned back Trump's fraudulent claims.
Had autocratic capture had been more advanced,
those judges, many of whom were appointed by Trump,
they wouldn't have been there.
And even if they were there, they
would have been too scared, too intimidated,
to rule the way they did.
So we wanted to go back in our respective regimes
(36:49):
that we study.
And more of an expert on the rise of Hitler,
you more of an expert on the rise of Mussolini.
And we wanted to show what happened
after they became dictators and what they did to the judiciary.
And many, if you go to the Italian case, which
was before Nazism, and Hitler learned
(37:11):
from what Mussolini did.
Nobody pays attention because it's Italy,
but it's actually more relevant.
When Mussolini declared dictatorship in 1925,
he passed all these laws.
Many of the laws are very similar to Project 2025.
He had mass firings of non-compliant civil servants,
(37:32):
a whole list of things that he did.
And the difference was he did it over time.
And he started out in a democracy.
And he chipped away within.
And then he had a crisis, and he declared dictatorship.
And then another round.
Hitler took forever to get to power.
In fact, he admired Mussolini at a bust of Mussolini
(37:53):
on his desk because Mussolini did it fast.
He got to power fast.
Hitler took like a decade.
And then he did everything fast.
But they did many of the same things.
And they're instructive because in each case,
people thought, the Germans thought, well,
Hitler's a lunatic, it's not going to be like Italy.
(38:15):
And so we also talked about the problem of denial
and thinking it can't happen here.
And we're going to take some questions from folks.
So this is your point at which to think about that.
And I think our good friend is finding a microphone.
There we go.
But right before we take those questions,
we've got a decent amount of time to do this.
(38:36):
Although I will tell you, we'll get you out of here
on a good schedule as well.
One last thing.
You used a phrase as regards the media,
the sort of transformation of media in a circumstance
like this.
And I noted in reading the 900 and some pages of Project
2025 that there is a substantial section on changing
(38:57):
the Federal Communications Commission in some big ways.
And I won't go into it because I don't want to go too far down
that rabbit hole.
But it is striking that there's quite a bit of, Project 2025
has quite a vision for having the White House have much more
control over the agency, the commission, that deals a lot
(39:17):
with how we define how media works and functions
in this country.
That makes perfect sense.
Because especially today, information warfare
is everything.
Trumpers, MAGA is very skilled, banning very skilled
at information warfare.
You have to control the mechanisms.
You have to control.
You have to be able to define what a fact is.
(39:41):
Right now, we're having a big, there's
a big division in our country.
When is a patriot a criminal?
Like the people of January 6th, I will call them thugs,
because I think they are, who were bashing in the heads
and they got arrested.
They're in prison.
The MAGA people call them patriots, political prisoners.
(40:01):
I call them thugs.
But you have to be able to control not only the structures
of the media and what they do.
For example, Orban in 2018, he got
the owners of 500 media properties to donate.
(40:22):
I have to use the air quotes.
Like God knows how much threat was behind the donations.
They donated control of these 500 media properties
to a government-allied foundation.
And thus, it's not direct like in the Hitler days.
The state does not directly control these 500.
It's a crony.
(40:43):
That's the Putin thing.
The same has happened in India with Modi.
This is like the formula now.
So of course, Trump, who is a man of media, a man of spectacle,
he's very smart about these things.
And so is Bannon and others.
They're going to be going after that.
You're also going to see, last thing I'll say,
(41:05):
a huge increase of things that Trump is expert in
and has used lawsuits to intimidate people.
He's suing people all the time.
And that's what the autocrat today does.
You do lawsuits to psychologically and financially
exhaust your opponents.
And the world champion of this is Erdogan in Turkey,
(41:29):
who has this genre of insult suits.
And anyone, like you could be, have an insult suit.
And anyone, it doesn't matter, important, not important.
And over 100,000 Turks have had insult suits levied on them
because of a social media post or a comment in the market.
(41:51):
So this, you would see a lot more of this.
And almost everybody who does public commentary
has been touched already.
Trump sued CNN for $450 million or something.
And somebody called me up and said,
do you know your name is on page one or two
of the legal document?
(42:12):
And I was like, what are you talking about?
And it was when the suit that he didn't like that people
were supposedly comparing him to Hitler.
And so he had a comment by Jake Tapper, Chris Chalitza,
and other people who worked full time for CNN.
And then there was one person who did an op-ed out
of the thousands of op-eds that CNN publishes.
(42:35):
And it was me because it was about his lying.
And I exposed his lying.
So I wasn't personally sued.
And the judge dismissed it.
A Trump-appointed judge.
But that is the future.
It's this endless lawsuits.
And that's part of it.
You're painting such an optimistic and happy picture here.
(42:56):
This is a time where we offer some of you folks a chance
to ask questions.
And we'd love to hear them.
I will tell you, last night in Milwaukee,
it was exemplary, really smart, incredible questions.
So now that we're in Madison.
Oh, you're making them feel pressured.
I don't want to put any pressure on anybody.
But this brave man here has got his hand up.
(43:17):
And so I think we'll begin there.
Thank you, Chris Morpheus.
Pleasure to be here.
And speaking of optimism, there is a 50-50 or maybe 51,
49% chance of a more optimistic outcome
of this forthcoming election.
And I'd like you to outline what the decline of authoritarianism
(43:39):
in the United States might look like,
given that Trump is not likely to be strong up, ala Mussolini.
I don't think he'll go to a bunker and himself.
He's going to be around for a while.
And I'm curious what you think about how he and his protégés
might fare should they face defeat this fall.
Yeah, that's such an interesting question.
(44:04):
No, in fact, we say that people have
studied these things that change comes slowly,
and then it comes suddenly, which is also
how actual regimes fell.
And many people did not expect the throngs of people
when Kamala Harris got the nomination.
And all of a sudden, everybody woke up in the joy and the hope
(44:26):
and the thousands and thousands of people.
That's because people were waiting to have that.
They had that inside themselves, and they
were waiting to feel the joy, and they were waiting
to be more activist.
And the voter registrations are up,
even before Taylor Swift did her thing.
So I will note that I just heard that it's
a 500% increase since she spoke up, which is quite remarkable.
(44:50):
And the fact that she spoke up will
give other people permission to speak up.
And she's unique in some ways.
But there are many other people who
have millions of followers.
So it's very possible that Kamala Harris will win.
And she has to win by a lot, because they
(45:11):
are going to try and not accept it.
And there are fears about violence.
But with bullies, when you push back, they sometimes fold
if they feel that the climate is not right.
And I did hear one interesting thing
that there was this meeting of Project 2025 people,
(45:34):
and they were talking about it becoming Project 2028.
Now, maybe that's just like me seizing onto a hope.
I mean, they're not going away.
There's too many people who have invested years of work,
hundreds of millions of dollars from all areas,
religious area, the legal, all the cast of characters.
(45:57):
They're not going away.
I don't know.
No, you're right.
It would have to be nine.
It would have to be nine.
I don't know.
Very good that we've got someone who knows math.
Yes.
You see?
Maybe a concession that they should have also.
Let me follow up on that, just before we take another question,
because I want to just follow up on one quick aspect of that.
And that is you were talking about optimism, hope,
(46:23):
and possibility.
Isn't it important that whoever's in charge going forward,
and that could be enlightened Republicans?
The future parties of all things happen,
that they shore up democratic systems.
We talk about maybe having what some people here
(46:43):
may think of as a hopeful or an optimistic result.
The key is to make sure, going forward,
that we're more resilient as a society.
Our voting rights are more protected.
Our democratic structures are more protected.
Yeah, actually, the way I see this is, on the one hand,
one of the things authoritarian specialize in,
especially in our age where democracies can
(47:05):
be destroyed from within, they analyze the system
to find the weaknesses, to find the loopholes.
For example, a lot of other countries
don't have such a long period of months
between somebody winning the election and taking office.
And you see how many things can go wrong
(47:28):
with that amount of time.
So that's an example.
There are a lot of structural things.
On the other hand, we have been living through just
the assault on elections.
Secretaries of state are doing, are mobilized and think,
and they're doing their analyses of what
are the weaknesses that need to be shored up.
So throughout the country, all of our institutions
(47:51):
are being reconsidered in the light of what the weaknesses
have been revealed to be.
And even the Supreme Court, people
see the Supreme Court differently
with the way that Alito and Thomas have acted
and the revelations about the corruption.
(48:12):
And that's painful.
That can be disorienting to find
that things you took for granted as being above board
or august are actually like the Supreme Court.
Some of those people are far right operatives.
They really are.
They're completely partisan and scrupulous.
(48:34):
So that's upsetting.
But out of it can come something better.
And Biden, for example, is trying
to he proposed an ethical watchdog body for the Supreme Court.
That's a good example of something
that, whether it happens or not, it's
an attentiveness to how we need to reform
in the interests of bolstering our democracy.
(48:57):
More questions.
We've got a woman right here in the middle.
Yes, it's sort of following up because that
was kind of my question, like what happens if he doesn't win?
And he's still going to have access to some kind of pulpit.
And unless he dies, we're going to continue to hear from him.
But I don't see anyone else.
(49:18):
So I'm asking you to look into your crystal ball.
I don't see anyone else ready to just go ahead and step
into his shoes and take up the mantle.
I mean, they may be prepping them.
But I don't see anyone quite there.
And just from the history and what you've written,
how quickly do you think that will happen to prepare someone?
(49:42):
That is a superb question.
Let me also just add one more little layer on it, which
I think comes off what you're saying here, which is that this
isn't all about Trump.
There's much more going here.
And I think one of the mistakes that happens
is it's so easy, especially in an election cycle,
focus in on personality.
But as you've written and said, there's a lot more going on.
(50:04):
And that may feed into an answer to this question.
Yeah, on the one hand, there can't be anybody
waiting in the wings.
Because the strongman does not brook any competition.
I have an essay in my newsletter called Ritual Humiliation,
(50:26):
The Autocrat's Favorite Game.
And you've seen how Trump, if anybody gets too popular
or look at Nikki Haley, people were voting for her
like well after she had to withdraw.
I think for J.D. Vance, he's dead.
Yeah.
I'd say Vance has done very well in avoiding getting too
popular.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, in fact, he was picked because of Peter Thiel.
(50:50):
There were other things going on there and money.
But Trump knew he wasn't charismatic.
In fact, there's a great story.
I'll just tell it really fast from Fascist Italy.
So studying fascism gave me an insight
into these mechanisms and these dynamics.
So there was a guy called Italo Balbo,
(51:12):
who was a first hour squadronist, a bloody killer.
And he became Minister of Aviation.
He was a world famous aviator.
He set numerous transatlantic records.
And he flew also, went to Chicago in 1933.
He was on the cover of Time.
There's still like a street named after him in Chicago.
(51:33):
And in 1934, he was like everywhere over the world.
Later that year, Mussolini demoted him,
said he couldn't be Minister of Aviation anymore,
and sent him to be Governor of Tripoli in Libya.
Bye.
Bye.
Because he was too famous.
He was younger also.
(51:53):
He was more handsome.
So if you're too competent, you will pay a price.
So nobody can be like Trump.
And the personality cult is that I alone can fix it.
That doesn't work if there's somebody
who might be able to fix it if I were not around.
There can't be any.
That's also why they get religious institutions to say,
(52:17):
you alone are there by the will of God.
And that way, there can be no one else.
Because the person, the body is unique.
And they all have this.
It's very interesting.
Let's take another question.
And I think we've got two hands up here.
I'm going to ask you to have each ask,
and then we'll circle it in.
(52:37):
Because I want to keep to our timeframe as best we can,
partially because of the live stream.
Hello.
Yeah.
So a question I had ever since high school,
because the one thing that has been on my mind over these years,
(52:57):
going back to 2015, when I started hearing about Trump's name,
I started noticing that I started seeing the swastika more
online, and it started to be associated more with Trump.
When he says that he's going to make America great again,
(53:18):
what time period is he referring to?
Good question.
Very good question.
Let's hold that for a second.
And then let's also, we've got one other question I want to get in,
and then we'll.
So I was more wondering about Italy's modern politics,
because I'm not up to date with that.
But does the current prime minister, Miloni,
have any elements of this strongman personality?
(53:41):
You go right to the heart of this writer here.
She's so interesting, because Giorgio Miloni is the prime minister
of Italy.
She was a hardcore neo-fascist in her,
like most of her life, frankly.
She was the head of the youth group,
which was full of hardcore people.
And she has two mentors, I always like to say.
(54:03):
One was Berlusconi, who made her the minister of youth.
The other was Mussolini.
She's totally attached to Mussolini.
And actually, I see in her, she's very tough.
She came up as a woman in full of this misogynist, racist,
like male fascists.
And she was the head of the youth wing.
(54:23):
And she speaks in a deep voice.
And she has this ducé kind of way of looking.
So she has this kind of element.
I don't want to be like too binary in speaking of gender
things, but she has, she's obviously, she's a woman.
(54:44):
And she says, I'm a mother first.
I'm a Christian mother.
She does all that.
But she's a tough person who reminds me
in her oratory of Mussolini.
She actually does.
And that's been, her toughness is why she survived
and been able to become prime minister, the first female
prime minister.
She has surprised people with some of the policies
(55:05):
she's taken too.
She's been a little bit.
Yeah, I'm a little cynical about that.
I mean, she took the right direction for democracy on Ukraine.
And domestically, she kind of used that as an alibi
almost endomestically.
(55:26):
She is highly homophobic, anti-immigrant,
doing for the natural family only one woman
and one man, the kind of reactionary.
So she's complicated.
She's a complicated figure.
She's an interesting, complicated person.
Before we get, let's finish off with this question of,
(55:46):
we're talking about Make America Great Again,
this question of what are you searching for?
Where are you going to?
I'm so glad you asked that.
And this is actually in one of the chapters of the book.
So autocrats, they traffic in utopia.
They're going to make everything.
The trains are going to run on time for Mussolini.
(56:09):
They're going to have infrastructure for Erdogan.
He's building huge this and that.
But at the same time, they traffic in nostalgia.
So it's never just make the nation great.
It's make the nation great again.
And in each case, the again is something different.
And you're asking about the US.
What Trump did is he took, like the US
(56:34):
was like a lot of other countries when
autocrats become popular.
And that is when people think there's been too much progress
made by the wrong people, i.e.
in our case, we had Barack Obama.
He was president.
And that was already nobody wanted to accept that.
Same-sex marriage was legalized.
Women were admitted to combat in 2013,
(56:56):
like full gender equity and armed forces.
So white males felt that they were losing something.
They were losing their authority.
So Trump comes in and he addresses himself
to all those people.
And he also creates a big tent for every kind of racist.
And there are many in our large country,
(57:16):
the neo-Nazis being one of them, but all the other kinds
of racists.
And he addressed himself to them.
And he told them, he communicated rather openly,
that they would find a home with him.
So that part of, again, making the nation great again
is when you weren't going to have
(57:38):
to worry anymore about people having voting rights
or reproductive rights, because he was going
to turn the clock back.
And that's why Kamala Harris, the slogan,
we're not going back, is in direct relation
to make America great again.
It's her response, her campaign's response to that.
(57:59):
Coming off that very quickly, and then we're
going to have a little close, we'll have a close out here.
Just one quick thing.
There's news reports just in the last day or so
on J.D. Vance talking about the Civil War
and some seeming sympathy for the southern side
of the Civil War.
So when you talk about going back,
(58:21):
we as a country have a history, and there
are places that you can go in American history that
are in many ways as dark as many other countries
and as unsettling as many other countries.
Well, we had a kind of regional authoritarianism,
which was the Jim Crow South.
(58:41):
And we didn't have a national experience of dictatorship,
but we had that.
And we also had sterilization policies, racist sterilization
policies that were model for the Nazis.
There's a whole transnational history,
and Trump and Maga and all of the collaborators,
(59:05):
the enablers, took that and reclaimed all of that.
And that's what my book addresses, that in different places,
this is the American case.
But every time these people come to power,
they reclaim and reappropriate those parts of those
illiberal or extremist parts of history
(59:26):
to justify them in the present and renew them for the future.
Ladies and gentlemen, you've just had an hour
with one of the great thinkers, not just
on these affairs at the moment.
And I hope you'll notice that while we talked a lot about things
that are happening now, it was always
to get to this kind of deeper understanding
of a great deal of history.
Please, two things.
(59:46):
Number one, stay in your place because we're
going to have one final comment from the people who
brought us together.
But first and foremost, please, a huge round of applause
for this great thinker who's come to play us.
Thank you.
You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy
(00:03):
and the Rule of Law Speaker Series,
presented by Democracy First.
Join us for a conversation with historian Ruth Ben-Giott.
Ruth is a leading scholar on fascism and authoritarianism
and the author of Strongman, from Mussolini to the present.
Journalist and national correspondent for the nation,
John Nichols, moderated this conversation
(00:24):
in Madison, Wisconsin.
Today, the former president of the United States,
and by the way, we're not here just,
this is about a lot more than Donald Trump.
And this is about a lot more than where the Republican Party is
or the Democratic Party at this point.
But we'll do a little bit of Trump to kind of get perspective
on some of what's going on here.
(00:45):
Today, the former president of the United States gave a speech.
And he was talking about mass deportations and suggesting
that the mass deportations of immigrants would begin
in Springfield, Ohio.
And he used some words in that speech
that were very familiar to you as a scholar of fascism,
(01:09):
or at least as a scholar of strongmen and authoritarians.
So why don't we begin, why don't we put this speech
in perspective a little bit and then we'll grow from there.
Yeah. Thanks for, thanks everybody for coming.
It's delighted to see you.
Thank you.
And it's just very disturbing to hear Trump speaking
(01:33):
like using this language of dehumanization.
What, you know, he's a very successful
and careful propagandist.
And one of the lines he's been following for years is choosing
certain groups of people, and this is immigrants now,
to dehumanize.
(01:53):
And he has called them vermin, which is language
that Mussolini used and Hitler used.
And also, you know, communists,
like he's called people scum.
These are, these are kind of, it goes beyond left
or right, authoritarians.
He talked about, you know, some time ago when he started this,
(02:13):
he talked about these people who were like hiding,
who have to be rooted out.
And this is also the language of, you know,
you have to, they're like, they're like insects or animals
and you have to find them and exterminate them really.
He doesn't, he doesn't fill in the rest of the sentence.
So today he used the word nests.
So this is again, so we have, you know, we have vermin,
(02:37):
nests, I mean, it's pretty explicit.
And he's twinning this and he's saying this to not just,
it's not just getting people to hate immigrants.
It's, I believe that he's been doing this
to condition Americans, to accept the chaos
and the violence that will come if he gets back
to the White House and he actually starts
(02:59):
these mass deportations.
And the thing I wanna say about those is, you know,
they're talking 10, 15 million people.
And in his time interview, he actually said 15
to 20 million people.
So let's take 15.
That is on the school of Hitler,
(03:19):
of in terms of numbers of people.
It's on the school, it's on the, sorry, the scale.
It's on the scale of Stalin.
It's like the old school dictator population re-engineering.
And it's more than the population of Sweden,
15 million people, or of Cuba, or of Indonesia,
or of Belgium.
(03:40):
And how is this going to happen?
They're gonna be, an infrastructure has to be built.
And so the last thing I'll say is,
when you build an infrastructure of repression,
you may be building it for one group,
but it's then there and it's used for others.
And an example is, when the Nazis built Dachau in 1933,
(04:03):
they didn't build it for Jews.
They had run out of room with the prisons
and they were storing people in warehouses
and they had to get something more official.
They were going after leftists and liberals,
socialists, communists, liberals.
And once it was built, other people, LGBTQ people,
all kinds of Jehovah's Witnesses,
(04:25):
all these other categories went in there
because it was there.
Even people with disabilities, ultimately.
That's right.
So think about what a deportation on the scale
would mean in terms of spaces, in terms of chaos,
sweeps at people's homes.
The United States is really gonna look like,
(04:46):
knocks at the door.
All the tropes of authoritarian horror
will be widespread if the number is 15 million.
It boggles the mind.
And so I just wanna, there's a link
between using this language and these plans.
(05:07):
And...
Not very light places to start out.
That's John's fault.
I blame myself.
But it's exactly where I wanna start
because I think it's important to start
in the heart of what we're talking about
and then we can begin to unpack it a little
and think about where we're at.
I wanna unpack one other thing too,
that we're still in the shadow,
the cusp of the debate between Kamala Harris,
(05:31):
a black woman who is the child of Jamaican
and Indian immigrants to this country,
and Donald Trump, former president of the United States,
businessman, reality TV star.
They had their debate and most of us watched it
in the context of contemporary politics.
(05:53):
But you saw things.
We talked a little bit about this last night.
You saw a whole bunch of things in that debate
that relate very much to your scholarship on strong men.
And so I'm glad to prompt you on a few of them,
but I particularly interested in the fact
that here was someone who you identify as a strong man
or an aspiring strong man,
(06:16):
encountering a woman and a woman who is in a position
of power.
So why don't we begin talking about that a little bit?
I'm actually, on the way here,
I was working on a piece from a newsletter.
I have a sub-stack newsletter, Loosid.
And the essay is called,
When the Strong Man, in quotes, meets a strong woman.
(06:36):
And, you know, Strong Men, you'll find,
has a chapter on masculinity.
It's called, Virility in the Book.
And it's the first book to elevate Machismo
to a tool of rule alongside propaganda,
corruption, violence.
Because it's so important to the identity
(07:00):
and the public persona of this type of leader.
And so one of the things you find
is when they're confronted by women who are their equals,
they just can't, they can't handle it.
And so they either pretend that the person really,
you know, they won't do the rituals to recognize.
(07:22):
So they, so we didn't wanna shake her hand.
She had to stride over and shake his hand.
But I was reminded of, and part of it's in my book,
Angela Merkel, who met Trump in 2017.
And what did she do?
Chancellor of Germany, and at that point,
often spoken of as sort of the leader of the Western world.
(07:44):
Yeah, one of the most powerful women in the world.
And what did he do?
He pretended she wasn't there.
He refused to shake her hand.
He pretended, he ignored her,
pretended he didn't hear her.
And then let's say, you're Merkel,
he just, he was like scowling.
(08:05):
And he just ignored her.
Because he didn't wanna relate.
And Angela, so my essay is about Angela Merkel,
who also had to deal with Putin,
who insulted her and unleashed his dog near here
because she had a fear of dogs.
And then Angela Merkel had to deal with Bear Lusconi,
and both of these people would make her wait for hours.
(08:28):
Or they would talk on the phone in front of her.
So basically, the strongman can,
he's so threatened that it brings out
infantile and fragile behaviors to make the,
you have to put the woman down to inflate your own ego.
And it's not original behavior, but that's what they do.
And so when I saw the debate,
(08:50):
and the way he also took her bait,
he couldn't help himself.
Because she was kind of treating him
without the regard that he is always treated with.
In fact, people still think he's the rightful president.
He has created a fictional world
(09:10):
that tens of millions of people
believe he won the 2020 election.
And they treat him as though he's still the president.
And some of the media gives him this deference,
despite him being a convicted felon
and all the other things we know.
So he's been able actually to continue
to inhabit this fictional world.
(09:32):
And in comes Kamala Harris and punctures it.
And he doesn't know what to do,
because nobody has done that to him so frontally.
So it's an extremely interesting moment
in terms of power, leadership, and gender.
Do you think Kamala Harris is aware
(09:54):
of some of the things you're talking about?
Oh yes.
I think, I mean, what I read
and what democratic politicians, Jared Moskowitz,
and others that they planned for this,
they planned to get to bait him,
to make him speak inanities,
to get him riled up so that he would show his unsuitability.
(10:20):
And it worked, because he couldn't contain himself.
He often can't contain himself.
It's not just with her.
But on that occasion, because this is also why
he keeps talking about as though Biden
were still his adversary.
He didn't wanna give up this idea of Biden
because Biden he could handle.
(10:40):
Kamala Harris, the prosecutor, who's not afraid of him,
this is what gets them unhinged.
And Angela Merkel, she was not afraid of Putin.
And Harris is not afraid of Trump.
And these are bullies.
And everyone around them, the most powerful GOP senators,
(11:01):
they all acquiesce, they all are intimidated,
at least publicly they act like they are.
And they bolster his ego.
And so he has this kind of just sycophants around him.
So they don't know how to handle other types of people.
That's what we saw.
(11:22):
The strong man in the Western world
is usually associated with a political party.
And is it fair to say, and you helped me with this,
is it fair to say that the political party
must become a cult of personality?
And if indeed that's the case,
is that perhaps why Donald Trump had such a hard time
(11:46):
imagining that Joe Biden would give up
the leadership of the Democratic Party
because it was impossible for him to imagine
surrendering that,
surrendering that control of a political organization,
not recognizing perhaps that the other party
wasn't a cult of personality?
I think so, but I think with Trump with Biden,
(12:08):
it was just very convenient for Trump to have Biden there.
Partly because as you saw,
the press was very interested in Biden's age
and state of his cognitive capabilities.
And that was keeping Trump's problems from being treated.
(12:32):
And that's just how it was.
There was an imbalance there.
And so it was convenient for Trump to have Biden there.
And he had better chance of winning with Biden there.
So I think that's why.
But the party, but this is the drama.
The party is what has happened to the GOP.
(12:52):
If you look at it, so what I do is,
I'm not an expert in US history,
although I born here, I grew up here.
I grew up here, I look at the GOP,
which frankly before 2016,
I didn't pay that much attention to the GOP.
And I look at it with the eyes of global autocracy.
So if you wanna track a party that is becoming autocratic,
(13:16):
the checklist is everything that has happened to the GOP.
It's a party that when a party is going autocratic,
there is no dissent allowed.
There literally becomes a party line.
You don't have to be in a style
in a dictatorship to have a party line.
Those who do not follow the party line are,
(13:37):
they're not, again, they're not purged and put in prison,
although Mike Pence had a gallows
on January 6th waiting for him.
But so the outcomes are different,
but you are not allowed to have any dissent.
And the tone and the priorities of the party
are set by the leader.
And so a very important concept is personalization of power.
(14:01):
And so everybody in my book is a personalist ruler.
And what this means is that the personal and private,
legal, financial, and other needs of the leader
come to set the tone for the party.
And it happened in Berlusconi's Italy.
It happened in all the cases I discussed.
So, example, the Republican National Convention,
(14:24):
a committee, rather, it has been paying
Trump's personal legal bills for a long time.
It stopped for a while and then it started again.
And who is the head of the RNC?
Lara Trump.
You always, personalist rulers always appoint
their family members as part of the inner circle
(14:44):
because then the corruption can be hidden more easily.
And so we had Jared Kushner and Ivanka
and now we have Lara Trump.
So the party has become an appendage
of Trump's personal problems.
And what is its main goal or main agenda of this party
is to solve Trump's problems,
is to get him back to power so he can make himself whole
(15:08):
financially and his legal problems can go away.
So, and that's why already in the 2020 campaign,
the Republican party didn't have any platform.
They declined to issue a platform beyond support of Trump.
So this is when I look at all these things
and I look at the journey of the GOP
(15:30):
and what happens to people who transgress,
like Liz Cheney, who Trump wants to said he'd like
to have a televised military tribunal for her.
It's a bit of an authoritarian thing.
That's what like Gaddafi used to do.
So when I look at all of this journey of the party,
I see a party that's become in its function
(15:53):
and its structure an autocratic party.
And we don't like that here
because the party is found in Wisconsin.
And so we have a certain sense of connection to it.
And also that I say that somewhat in a somewhat
jacquely way, but truthfully,
I think a lot of people have a sense of connection to it.
(16:15):
There's a sense of, and so what's going on here
is complicated because it isn't just
about the development of a new party or something like that.
This is a party with deep roots
and deep history in the country.
But does that not also,
when you become the candidate of a party,
that's a very empowering thing
in the American political system
(16:37):
because we have this duopoly.
And so if you are the leader of one party,
our media sees you in a certain way,
our political class in general sees you in a certain way.
And I would argue that a substantial portion of voters
see you beyond what they like or dislike about you,
that you are a part of something that they know
(16:57):
or something their family's deeply rooted in.
So that is a somewhat of a variation
from some other countries as regards
the rise of a strongman.
It's many other countries of multi-party system.
And in the past, Americans were like,
oh, those countries are so confused.
It's so easy to make the government's fall.
(17:19):
We're stable because we just have our bipartisan thing.
But what happens if one of the two parties
makes the journey I just described?
And now when I'm talking about it becoming autocratic,
I don't mean that the average Republican voter
doesn't want democracy anymore.
I'm talking about the leadership
(17:39):
and the way it's functioning at the highest levels.
But although it has affected who's in the party
at the local and state level,
the denial of, you know,
it's not just Matt Gaetz who's refusing to say
whether he will accept the outcome of the election
in order to be in the party.
You have to be saying that at every level.
(18:02):
So, you know, but now it's a bit of a liability
in our country to have the bipartisanship.
And I'll give you an example.
In Italy, which is a country I study,
in 2019 there's this very thuggish guy,
Matteo Salvini, the head of a far-right party.
And it seemed like he could,
(18:24):
he was on track to become prime minister.
It would have been a nightmare.
He would go around with his t-shirt saying
how much he loved Putin.
So all the other parties,
even parties that didn't like each other,
got together and made a coalition
and made sure that he did not succeed.
(18:44):
So that was called, it's called gatekeeping.
So the extremist is not allowed to prevail
because everybody else goes together.
We can't do that, because we just have the two parties.
And it's a terrible shame, you know,
and it's a drama for people.
If you're a Republican and you don't,
you're not MAGA and you don't think January 6
(19:06):
was an insurrection and violent,
you're buying the other line,
you don't have a home.
It's really sad.
And so I've been involved with a lot of bipartisan initiatives
and I've written about Republicans for Harris.
So these, and all the people who are speaking out
who are trusted authorities,
(19:27):
who cannot be accused of being, you know,
like bleeding heart liberals,
and they're not, and they're all for Harris.
And they're not asking people to become Democrats.
They're asking people to put country before party,
that's one of the slogans,
this time on this occasion,
and vote for Harris because it's the best thing
(19:49):
for the country right now,
because of the state of the GOP.
So we're in, so I see these things as positive,
not because I don't want Trump to get in
because I don't want a dictatorship here,
but also because it's evidence of a flexibility
that's emerging in our quite rigid and fossilized
(20:11):
bipartisan system.
Things are happening.
And there's actually a lot of stuff happening.
We just don't, the media is not focusing on it.
There's tons of bridge building,
there are coalitions, there's so much going on.
And I wish people knew,
I wish it was on page one, you know,
or top of the screen,
because it would help people to feel more hopeful
(20:34):
and less constrained by our circumstances.
And I think it's important to point out
for our conversation here,
though there are folks,
some of these Republicans for Harris and folks like that,
we're not here telling people how to vote.
And this is, we, I know what you're very focused on,
(20:54):
although you'll have your personal preferences,
but you're focused on teaching people
about the circumstance that we are in, right?
The moment that we are in and understanding it as such.
And I think that that is actually in many ways
a much more valuable contribution
than just yelling vote for somebody,
don't vote for somebody or something like that.
It is to bring some perspective to it.
That's why this nonpartisan group United to Preserve
(21:16):
and its allies have been out here
trying to open up these conversations
to give it some perspective.
Yeah, that's why I'm here.
Yeah.
Because I believe that this is a very valuable enterprise
and it's cross partisan, very, very important.
Because people want to also catalog you.
Like I'm very honored, I'm gonna be giving
(21:38):
the Bancroft lecture to the US Naval Academy
in a few weeks because I've written about military coups
or whatever, but you can imagine the mail I get,
like you're just a liberal, commie, you know,
and people's positions are much more nuanced, right?
And that's where the country, the patriotism comes in, right?
(22:02):
And I think cross partisan things right now
are so important because we are in an exceptional moment.
And this election is not a normal election.
It's really one of these things that historians study.
It's a turning point.
It's a critical juncture, as we often say.
It's going to be a referendum.
(22:22):
So yes, policy is important,
but it's not about policy primarily.
It's a referendum on the type of political system
we want to live in.
Because Trump is saying he wants to be a dictator
and he has been conditioning Americans
to think dictators are good.
I had my research assistant do it tally.
It's over 60 times in the last three years.
(22:44):
Trump has praised Putin, Xi, Kim.
I mean, the most murderous, horrible people,
like communist dictators, that's who he is
over and over and over holding up to the American people
as good leadership.
And so, and then you have the, you know,
he's not so fringe, but Tucker Carlson who says,
(23:06):
leadership means killing people.
Well, okay, if you're like Hitler, I guess it does.
But that's what we're dealing with.
So this is a, I see this election as a referendum
on who we want to be politically.
And in addition to United Preserve,
there's never groups that have co-sponsored
(23:27):
and have invited folks for your night.
And that's, I want to mention the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is that the wrong with applauding these groups?
Law forward, common cause in Wisconsin.
Leaders ethics, Wisconsin Interfaith
(23:50):
voter engagement campaign.
And the Wisconsin Conservation Voters.
And voices, I apologize, Wisconsin Conservation Voices.
And obviously you heard a little bit in the introduction
about the citizen promise and all these very important things
that are wrapped in here.
And they invited you because you've been working
(24:10):
in this area for a long time.
You're not a new arrival to this discussion group.
And so why don't you give us just a quick sense of how,
you know, like when you're, I presume there was an important
like four or five years old, you said, you know,
I think I'm going to devote my life to writing
about authoritarianism.
How did you come to be at this point,
(24:32):
one of the handful of people in the world who is thought
of as a real expert on this topic?
So I grew up in a totally improbable place
for studying like murderous dictators.
Pacific Palisades, California.
A beach town, very nice place.
(24:54):
A small town.
And my mother's from Scotland and she's Protestant
and my dad's Israeli, but from a Middle Eastern family.
So my grandmother is actually from the West Bank.
So what used to be called Palestinian Jew.
So, you know, a Sephardic Jewish family.
(25:14):
So I did not grow up hearing about the Holocaust.
I didn't grow up hearing about Mussolini.
But it turns out that my town and towns around it
were where a lot of famous exiles from nobbsism came.
Like Bertold Breck and Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg,
like, you know, famous people.
(25:35):
And maybe because I didn't have anyone,
any family members closer than a 13 hour plane ride away,
I, and my parents are immigrants, I'm first generation.
I started thinking like, what did it mean to somebody,
you know, you're doing your life in your country
and then some lunatic comes in and you have to leave
and start over halfway around the world.
(25:57):
And if you read Strongman, so I started thinking
when I was 16 years old, 15 years old about this.
And it turns out that Arnold Schoenberg, the composer,
his son was a teacher at my school.
He was a math teacher.
I was awful at math, so I never took his class.
But I started going to talk to him about this.
And he encouraged me to study it.
(26:18):
So when I went to UCLA, I did my senior thesis
on auto-climperer, the composer.
So I kept thinking about this stuff.
And then I decided to do Italy.
Somebody said to me, you know how these like very cat,
like a remark can just a casual remark.
Someone said, well, why don't you do Italy
because Mussolini lasted twice as long
(26:41):
and you know, there's not as much work done on it.
And I wanted to do like cultural political history.
So, and then I went to Rome and I took one look at Rome
and I was like, I'm doing Italy, right?
So that's how it started.
And I did, I was a regular academic
and did books on fascist Italy.
And I had started to write for CNN about historical things,
(27:04):
but I didn't have any, you know, that's all I was doing.
And then Trump came on the scene.
And in particular, you know, I started writing about
Bannon and white nationalism in the fall of 2015.
I started writing about guns.
It's very interesting to go back and think what,
what was catching my attention,
(27:26):
having studied fascism and thus violence.
And then Trump made the speech January, 2016.
I could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone.
And I wouldn't lose any followers.
If you study fascism, that was,
red flag is an understatement.
He was saying, he was doing many things that Duterte did,
(27:51):
Mussolini himself did.
He was associating himself with violence.
He was saying he was personally capable of violence
in public and he was saying that he'd be loved
or he wouldn't, he would be approved of
because of the violence, that's fascism.
So he seemed so dangerous that I started writing
(28:14):
for CNN about that.
I started giving interviews and I felt like
I had this skill set, I had this knowledge.
I seemed to be able to write for the public and speak.
So I started giving actually dozens and dozens
of interviews to journalists because I realized
that people in America didn't have a frame for,
(28:35):
it was like it can't happen here.
But nobody was using the word authoritarian.
Now it's everywhere or strong men.
But authoritarian was like people could hardly pronounce it
because it is a mouthful.
And I decided I had to start
by also educating the journalists.
So I took the time, I took all of their requests
(28:56):
and I talked to them and I had so many,
all the White House correspondents.
I was constantly in contact.
So I feel like I tried a lot of the times
it was behind the scenes to shape the knowledge
and the language that was used.
So that's how it all got started.
And then the TV and stuff came a bit later.
(29:18):
And one of the things that's striking is that you said,
well, I felt that folks didn't have a frame for it.
I think there's also, it's also true
that they didn't have a comfort level with saying it.
And so for a very long time,
I think probably years,
there was a discomfort with using the word strongman,
(29:38):
a discomfort with using the word authoritarian,
certainly a discomfort with using the word fascist.
And you saw that, you saw resistance to that,
not just in the media, which were certainly the case,
but also even in the political class,
even Democrats who might oppose
were very, very uncomfortable with going to these words.
It seems like now there's more of it.
(30:00):
What has happened?
Tell us, take us through that journey.
No, it's so interesting.
And I think very carefully about what language I use.
And the reason, of course, it's satisfying to say,
oh, so is a fascist.
And there are characters out there,
like Steve Bannon is a fascist,
just all of his ideologies, his style,
the way he sees politics.
(30:21):
Matt Gaetz, he's like getting there.
For example, he says things all the time
that are fascist things.
For example, he showed up at the Iowa State Fair this summer
where people are with their families,
they're eating their corn dogs,
and it was a Trump rally.
He shows up.
And he says this thing casually,
(30:43):
only force can bring change to a corrupt town
like Washington, DC.
I hear that, this is post January 6th, right?
Only force, like you're saying,
because what fascists believe is that violence
is the way you solve differences.
And violence is the way you push history forward,
the direct action stuff.
You don't use elections, you have violence.
(31:07):
And so he says things all the time.
But I also felt from the very beginning,
which is why in my book I don't call Trump a fascist,
I call him an authoritarian,
because Trump is just as enamored of Xi Jinping,
and he was funded by the Chinese,
like while he was president, and he's boasting about it.
(31:28):
Inside countries, left versus right matters a lot.
And we're in the middle of this right wing counter-revolution.
That's why Harris says we're not going back.
But at the biggest level, whether they're left or right,
like right now, Putin and Xi are allies.
One is far right and one is a communist.
(31:48):
What does that mean, right?
So Trump is an authoritarian.
He's transactional.
He will take money and he will take the playbook
from anybody.
He's sending love letters, he says, with Kim.
Kim's a communist.
So to call him a fascist misses part of the point,
(32:09):
that it's beyond that, it's about authoritarianism,
raw power, corruption, the whole playbook.
So that's why I choose that language.
And it was notable that in the debate the other day,
Victor Orban's name came up.
And I think a little shame on media there.
(32:30):
It is amazing to me that you can have
a national presidential debate.
And Victor Orban's name is mentioned
in a certainly positive context by one of the candidates.
And there's not a follow-up question.
He likes me.
He likes me.
But there wasn't a follow-up question on that.
Do you want to have, would you like the United States
to be more like Orban's Hungary?
(32:52):
It's a very easy question.
Yeah, you know, and I must say that Hungary has made quite
a name for itself under Orban.
And it is the model country for the Project 2025 in part.
When Orban comes to the States, he's done this repeatedly.
(33:15):
He's very involved in delegitimizing our democracy.
So he doesn't go to the White House.
Why should he go to the White House?
Even though you're supposed to do that,
if you're ahead of state, you're supposed to go to the White
House.
He goes to the Heritage Foundation,
his friend Kevin Roberts, and he goes to Mar-a-Lago
to kiss the ring.
And he's very much the model because he's
(33:38):
been so successful at what we call autocratic capture.
And yet, you don't hear about people falling out of windows
or being poisoned.
There's lots of threat that goes on.
There's all kinds of, in fact, what
I would have said at the debate if I had been there
and could have heckled that Hungary was just
(34:00):
ranked the most corrupt country in the EU.
And because that's what Orban is, he's a corrupt autocrat.
So that's, of course, Trump is going to think that's great.
I mean, that's his model.
And what people don't understand is that authoritarians are not
interested in governing in a democratic sense.
(34:20):
They couldn't care less about the welfare of the people.
They want to make money off of public office.
They want to amass as much power and never have to leave.
And they want total control of the message.
So they have different goals.
And when he cites Orban, that should
be where the knowledge goes.
(34:40):
But people still hesitate.
So we've been through the debate.
We've been through a lot of these different developments
of the moment.
Not long ago, you and Ben Het wrote an op-ed for the LA
Times.
And the title was somewhat provocative.
(35:01):
Would Trump stop free and fair elections?
Hitler and Mussolini's paths could be a clue.
What were you saying there?
Well, you don't choose your titles.
So you can give us that.
That's the oldest journalist excuse in the world, right?
Somebody else writes the headline.
(35:24):
Yeah, we wanted to focus on elections
because today there's this.
Well, this is the Orban model also, but also Turkey.
And today there's this thing, electoral autocracy,
where you don't have to get rid of elections totally
like the old school.
You keep them going.
(35:44):
And then you do things to society,
like domesticate the media.
You purge the election apparatus.
You purge the judiciary.
And the media is important because in the last Hungarian
election, most of the people never even
heard the message of the opposition candidate
(36:06):
because Orban has domesticated 90% of the media.
And that's happened here, too, with Fox and Sinclair now.
And people don't hear the message.
Now, the judiciary works with elections.
And because, for example, in 2020, over 60 judges
(36:26):
turned back Trump's fraudulent claims.
Had autocratic capture had been more advanced,
those judges, many of whom were appointed by Trump,
they wouldn't have been there.
And even if they were there, they
would have been too scared, too intimidated,
to rule the way they did.
So we wanted to go back in our respective regimes
(36:49):
that we study.
And more of an expert on the rise of Hitler,
you more of an expert on the rise of Mussolini.
And we wanted to show what happened
after they became dictators and what they did to the judiciary.
And many, if you go to the Italian case, which
was before Nazism, and Hitler learned
(37:11):
from what Mussolini did.
Nobody pays attention because it's Italy,
but it's actually more relevant.
When Mussolini declared dictatorship in 1925,
he passed all these laws.
Many of the laws are very similar to Project 2025.
He had mass firings of non-compliant civil servants,
(37:32):
a whole list of things that he did.
And the difference was he did it over time.
And he started out in a democracy.
And he chipped away within.
And then he had a crisis, and he declared dictatorship.
And then another round.
Hitler took forever to get to power.
In fact, he admired Mussolini at a bust of Mussolini
(37:53):
on his desk because Mussolini did it fast.
He got to power fast.
Hitler took like a decade.
And then he did everything fast.
But they did many of the same things.
And they're instructive because in each case,
people thought, the Germans thought, well,
Hitler's a lunatic, it's not going to be like Italy.
(38:15):
And so we also talked about the problem of denial
and thinking it can't happen here.
And we're going to take some questions from folks.
So this is your point at which to think about that.
And I think our good friend is finding a microphone.
There we go.
But right before we take those questions,
we've got a decent amount of time to do this.
(38:36):
Although I will tell you, we'll get you out of here
on a good schedule as well.
One last thing.
You used a phrase as regards the media,
the sort of transformation of media in a circumstance
like this.
And I noted in reading the 900 and some pages of Project
2025 that there is a substantial section on changing
(38:57):
the Federal Communications Commission in some big ways.
And I won't go into it because I don't want to go too far down
that rabbit hole.
But it is striking that there's quite a bit of, Project 2025
has quite a vision for having the White House have much more
control over the agency, the commission, that deals a lot
(39:17):
with how we define how media works and functions
in this country.
That makes perfect sense.
Because especially today, information warfare
is everything.
Trumpers, MAGA is very skilled, banning very skilled
at information warfare.
You have to control the mechanisms.
You have to control.
You have to be able to define what a fact is.
(39:41):
Right now, we're having a big, there's
a big division in our country.
When is a patriot a criminal?
Like the people of January 6th, I will call them thugs,
because I think they are, who were bashing in the heads
and they got arrested.
They're in prison.
The MAGA people call them patriots, political prisoners.
(40:01):
I call them thugs.
But you have to be able to control not only the structures
of the media and what they do.
For example, Orban in 2018, he got
the owners of 500 media properties to donate.
(40:22):
I have to use the air quotes.
Like God knows how much threat was behind the donations.
They donated control of these 500 media properties
to a government-allied foundation.
And thus, it's not direct like in the Hitler days.
The state does not directly control these 500.
It's a crony.
(40:43):
That's the Putin thing.
The same has happened in India with Modi.
This is like the formula now.
So of course, Trump, who is a man of media, a man of spectacle,
he's very smart about these things.
And so is Bannon and others.
They're going to be going after that.
You're also going to see, last thing I'll say,
(41:05):
a huge increase of things that Trump is expert in
and has used lawsuits to intimidate people.
He's suing people all the time.
And that's what the autocrat today does.
You do lawsuits to psychologically and financially
exhaust your opponents.
And the world champion of this is Erdogan in Turkey,
(41:29):
who has this genre of insult suits.
And anyone, like you could be, have an insult suit.
And anyone, it doesn't matter, important, not important.
And over 100,000 Turks have had insult suits levied on them
because of a social media post or a comment in the market.
(41:51):
So this, you would see a lot more of this.
And almost everybody who does public commentary
has been touched already.
Trump sued CNN for $450 million or something.
And somebody called me up and said,
do you know your name is on page one or two
of the legal document?
(42:12):
And I was like, what are you talking about?
And it was when the suit that he didn't like that people
were supposedly comparing him to Hitler.
And so he had a comment by Jake Tapper, Chris Chalitza,
and other people who worked full time for CNN.
And then there was one person who did an op-ed out
of the thousands of op-eds that CNN publishes.
(42:35):
And it was me because it was about his lying.
And I exposed his lying.
So I wasn't personally sued.
And the judge dismissed it.
A Trump-appointed judge.
But that is the future.
It's this endless lawsuits.
And that's part of it.
You're painting such an optimistic and happy picture here.
(42:56):
This is a time where we offer some of you folks a chance
to ask questions.
And we'd love to hear them.
I will tell you, last night in Milwaukee,
it was exemplary, really smart, incredible questions.
So now that we're in Madison.
Oh, you're making them feel pressured.
I don't want to put any pressure on anybody.
But this brave man here has got his hand up.
(43:17):
And so I think we'll begin there.
Thank you, Chris Morpheus.
Pleasure to be here.
And speaking of optimism, there is a 50-50 or maybe 51,
49% chance of a more optimistic outcome
of this forthcoming election.
And I'd like you to outline what the decline of authoritarianism
(43:39):
in the United States might look like,
given that Trump is not likely to be strong up, ala Mussolini.
I don't think he'll go to a bunker and himself.
He's going to be around for a while.
And I'm curious what you think about how he and his protégés
might fare should they face defeat this fall.
Yeah, that's such an interesting question.
(44:04):
No, in fact, we say that people have
studied these things that change comes slowly,
and then it comes suddenly, which is also
how actual regimes fell.
And many people did not expect the throngs of people
when Kamala Harris got the nomination.
And all of a sudden, everybody woke up in the joy and the hope
(44:26):
and the thousands and thousands of people.
That's because people were waiting to have that.
They had that inside themselves, and they
were waiting to feel the joy, and they were waiting
to be more activist.
And the voter registrations are up,
even before Taylor Swift did her thing.
So I will note that I just heard that it's
a 500% increase since she spoke up, which is quite remarkable.
(44:50):
And the fact that she spoke up will
give other people permission to speak up.
And she's unique in some ways.
But there are many other people who
have millions of followers.
So it's very possible that Kamala Harris will win.
And she has to win by a lot, because they
(45:11):
are going to try and not accept it.
And there are fears about violence.
But with bullies, when you push back, they sometimes fold
if they feel that the climate is not right.
And I did hear one interesting thing
that there was this meeting of Project 2025 people,
(45:34):
and they were talking about it becoming Project 2028.
Now, maybe that's just like me seizing onto a hope.
I mean, they're not going away.
There's too many people who have invested years of work,
hundreds of millions of dollars from all areas,
religious area, the legal, all the cast of characters.
(45:57):
They're not going away.
I don't know.
No, you're right.
It would have to be nine.
It would have to be nine.
I don't know.
Very good that we've got someone who knows math.
Yes.
You see?
Maybe a concession that they should have also.
Let me follow up on that, just before we take another question,
because I want to just follow up on one quick aspect of that.
And that is you were talking about optimism, hope,
(46:23):
and possibility.
Isn't it important that whoever's in charge going forward,
and that could be enlightened Republicans?
The future parties of all things happen,
that they shore up democratic systems.
We talk about maybe having what some people here
(46:43):
may think of as a hopeful or an optimistic result.
The key is to make sure, going forward,
that we're more resilient as a society.
Our voting rights are more protected.
Our democratic structures are more protected.
Yeah, actually, the way I see this is, on the one hand,
one of the things authoritarian specialize in,
especially in our age where democracies can
(47:05):
be destroyed from within, they analyze the system
to find the weaknesses, to find the loopholes.
For example, a lot of other countries
don't have such a long period of months
between somebody winning the election and taking office.
And you see how many things can go wrong
(47:28):
with that amount of time.
So that's an example.
There are a lot of structural things.
On the other hand, we have been living through just
the assault on elections.
Secretaries of state are doing, are mobilized and think,
and they're doing their analyses of what
are the weaknesses that need to be shored up.
So throughout the country, all of our institutions
(47:51):
are being reconsidered in the light of what the weaknesses
have been revealed to be.
And even the Supreme Court, people
see the Supreme Court differently
with the way that Alito and Thomas have acted
and the revelations about the corruption.
(48:12):
And that's painful.
That can be disorienting to find
that things you took for granted as being above board
or august are actually like the Supreme Court.
Some of those people are far right operatives.
They really are.
They're completely partisan and scrupulous.
(48:34):
So that's upsetting.
But out of it can come something better.
And Biden, for example, is trying
to he proposed an ethical watchdog body for the Supreme Court.
That's a good example of something
that, whether it happens or not, it's
an attentiveness to how we need to reform
in the interests of bolstering our democracy.
(48:57):
More questions.
We've got a woman right here in the middle.
Yes, it's sort of following up because that
was kind of my question, like what happens if he doesn't win?
And he's still going to have access to some kind of pulpit.
And unless he dies, we're going to continue to hear from him.
But I don't see anyone else.
(49:18):
So I'm asking you to look into your crystal ball.
I don't see anyone else ready to just go ahead and step
into his shoes and take up the mantle.
I mean, they may be prepping them.
But I don't see anyone quite there.
And just from the history and what you've written,
how quickly do you think that will happen to prepare someone?
(49:42):
That is a superb question.
Let me also just add one more little layer on it, which
I think comes off what you're saying here, which is that this
isn't all about Trump.
There's much more going here.
And I think one of the mistakes that happens
is it's so easy, especially in an election cycle,
focus in on personality.
But as you've written and said, there's a lot more going on.
(50:04):
And that may feed into an answer to this question.
Yeah, on the one hand, there can't be anybody
waiting in the wings.
Because the strongman does not brook any competition.
I have an essay in my newsletter called Ritual Humiliation,
(50:26):
The Autocrat's Favorite Game.
And you've seen how Trump, if anybody gets too popular
or look at Nikki Haley, people were voting for her
like well after she had to withdraw.
I think for J.D. Vance, he's dead.
Yeah.
I'd say Vance has done very well in avoiding getting too
popular.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, in fact, he was picked because of Peter Thiel.
(50:50):
There were other things going on there and money.
But Trump knew he wasn't charismatic.
In fact, there's a great story.
I'll just tell it really fast from Fascist Italy.
So studying fascism gave me an insight
into these mechanisms and these dynamics.
So there was a guy called Italo Balbo,
(51:12):
who was a first hour squadronist, a bloody killer.
And he became Minister of Aviation.
He was a world famous aviator.
He set numerous transatlantic records.
And he flew also, went to Chicago in 1933.
He was on the cover of Time.
There's still like a street named after him in Chicago.
(51:33):
And in 1934, he was like everywhere over the world.
Later that year, Mussolini demoted him,
said he couldn't be Minister of Aviation anymore,
and sent him to be Governor of Tripoli in Libya.
Bye.
Bye.
Because he was too famous.
He was younger also.
(51:53):
He was more handsome.
So if you're too competent, you will pay a price.
So nobody can be like Trump.
And the personality cult is that I alone can fix it.
That doesn't work if there's somebody
who might be able to fix it if I were not around.
There can't be any.
That's also why they get religious institutions to say,
(52:17):
you alone are there by the will of God.
And that way, there can be no one else.
Because the person, the body is unique.
And they all have this.
It's very interesting.
Let's take another question.
And I think we've got two hands up here.
I'm going to ask you to have each ask,
and then we'll circle it in.
(52:37):
Because I want to keep to our timeframe as best we can,
partially because of the live stream.
Hello.
Yeah.
So a question I had ever since high school,
because the one thing that has been on my mind over these years,
(52:57):
going back to 2015, when I started hearing about Trump's name,
I started noticing that I started seeing the swastika more
online, and it started to be associated more with Trump.
When he says that he's going to make America great again,
(53:18):
what time period is he referring to?
Good question.
Very good question.
Let's hold that for a second.
And then let's also, we've got one other question I want to get in,
and then we'll.
So I was more wondering about Italy's modern politics,
because I'm not up to date with that.
But does the current prime minister, Miloni,
have any elements of this strongman personality?
(53:41):
You go right to the heart of this writer here.
She's so interesting, because Giorgio Miloni is the prime minister
of Italy.
She was a hardcore neo-fascist in her,
like most of her life, frankly.
She was the head of the youth group,
which was full of hardcore people.
And she has two mentors, I always like to say.
(54:03):
One was Berlusconi, who made her the minister of youth.
The other was Mussolini.
She's totally attached to Mussolini.
And actually, I see in her, she's very tough.
She came up as a woman in full of this misogynist, racist,
like male fascists.
And she was the head of the youth wing.
(54:23):
And she speaks in a deep voice.
And she has this ducé kind of way of looking.
So she has this kind of element.
I don't want to be like too binary in speaking of gender
things, but she has, she's obviously, she's a woman.
(54:44):
And she says, I'm a mother first.
I'm a Christian mother.
She does all that.
But she's a tough person who reminds me
in her oratory of Mussolini.
She actually does.
And that's been, her toughness is why she survived
and been able to become prime minister, the first female
prime minister.
She has surprised people with some of the policies
(55:05):
she's taken too.
She's been a little bit.
Yeah, I'm a little cynical about that.
I mean, she took the right direction for democracy on Ukraine.
And domestically, she kind of used that as an alibi
almost endomestically.
(55:26):
She is highly homophobic, anti-immigrant,
doing for the natural family only one woman
and one man, the kind of reactionary.
So she's complicated.
She's a complicated figure.
She's an interesting, complicated person.
Before we get, let's finish off with this question of,
(55:46):
we're talking about Make America Great Again,
this question of what are you searching for?
Where are you going to?
I'm so glad you asked that.
And this is actually in one of the chapters of the book.
So autocrats, they traffic in utopia.
They're going to make everything.
The trains are going to run on time for Mussolini.
(56:09):
They're going to have infrastructure for Erdogan.
He's building huge this and that.
But at the same time, they traffic in nostalgia.
So it's never just make the nation great.
It's make the nation great again.
And in each case, the again is something different.
And you're asking about the US.
What Trump did is he took, like the US
(56:34):
was like a lot of other countries when
autocrats become popular.
And that is when people think there's been too much progress
made by the wrong people, i.e.
in our case, we had Barack Obama.
He was president.
And that was already nobody wanted to accept that.
Same-sex marriage was legalized.
Women were admitted to combat in 2013,
(56:56):
like full gender equity and armed forces.
So white males felt that they were losing something.
They were losing their authority.
So Trump comes in and he addresses himself
to all those people.
And he also creates a big tent for every kind of racist.
And there are many in our large country,
(57:16):
the neo-Nazis being one of them, but all the other kinds
of racists.
And he addressed himself to them.
And he told them, he communicated rather openly,
that they would find a home with him.
So that part of, again, making the nation great again
is when you weren't going to have
(57:38):
to worry anymore about people having voting rights
or reproductive rights, because he was going
to turn the clock back.
And that's why Kamala Harris, the slogan,
we're not going back, is in direct relation
to make America great again.
It's her response, her campaign's response to that.
(57:59):
Coming off that very quickly, and then we're
going to have a little close, we'll have a close out here.
Just one quick thing.
There's news reports just in the last day or so
on J.D. Vance talking about the Civil War
and some seeming sympathy for the southern side
of the Civil War.
So when you talk about going back,
(58:21):
we as a country have a history, and there
are places that you can go in American history that
are in many ways as dark as many other countries
and as unsettling as many other countries.
Well, we had a kind of regional authoritarianism,
which was the Jim Crow South.
(58:41):
And we didn't have a national experience of dictatorship,
but we had that.
And we also had sterilization policies, racist sterilization
policies that were model for the Nazis.
There's a whole transnational history,
and Trump and Maga and all of the collaborators,
(59:05):
the enablers, took that and reclaimed all of that.
And that's what my book addresses, that in different places,
this is the American case.
But every time these people come to power,
they reclaim and reappropriate those parts of those
illiberal or extremist parts of history
(59:26):
to justify them in the present and renew them for the future.
Ladies and gentlemen, you've just had an hour
with one of the great thinkers, not just
on these affairs at the moment.
And I hope you'll notice that while we talked a lot about things
that are happening now, it was always
to get to this kind of deeper understanding
of a great deal of history.
Please, two things.
(59:46):
Number one, stay in your place because we're
going to have one final comment from the people who
brought us together.
But first and foremost, please, a huge round of applause
for this great thinker who's come to play us.
Thank you.
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