Politico has posted an interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of Italian history and expert on autocracy at NYU, and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. She originally published it in July 2020, during the Biden-Trump election campaign, but even then she predicted Trump couldn’t leave quietly if he lost.
“I just predicted that he wouldn’t leave in a quiet manner,” Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University told me recently. “He’s an authoritarian, and they can’t leave office. They don’t have good endings and they don’t leave properly.”
The interview is long, covers a number of excellent observations about the current Republican party, and is well worth reading. I just want to highlight a couple of points Dr. Ben-Ghiat made:
The genius of the “big lie” was not only that it sparked a movement that ended up with January 6 to physically allow him to stay in office. But psychologically the “big lie” was very important because it prevented his propagandized followers from having to reckon with the fact that he lost. And it maintains him as their hero, as their winner, as the invincible Trump, but also as the wronged Trump, the victim. Victimhood is extremely important for all autocrats. They always have to be the biggest victim.
In other words, Trump is never ever going to admit he lost, no matter how much evidence is lined up to prove him wrong. Ditto for his followers. Talking sense to them is just a waste of time.
But it’s anything but a waste of time to keep working to uncover what he really did in office:
The big question will be what will happen in the coming months so that [Trump] can retain that power because he’s very toxic. There’s always this worry that maybe the investigations will bring more things out, so it’s not a done deal that he will get the nomination. But he’s been remarkably successful in ways that don’t surprise me at all. Because that’s how authoritarians are. They’re personality cults, even if they rule in a democracy like [Italy’s former prime minister Silvio] Berlusconi did.
And this is important because, says the professor, it’s the only way to get rid of him:
Berlusconi’s personality cult did not deflate until he was convicted, which he eventually was. That’s what it takes. It takes prosecution and conviction to deflate their personality cults. [emphasis added]
Paging Merrick Garland. Merrick Garland to the ER, stat! (To be fair, there are signs Garland may be scrubbing up for surgery, but does he really have to take so long at it?) The point is, there is no cure for Trump at the ballot box. We have to get him into the penalty box. (Please file any complaints about metaphor mixing with the management.)
The ballot box did treat the symptoms of Trumpauthoritianism, but only at the federal level:
Trump did an enormous amount of damage. And that was why he was there. He was there to wreck our democracy. And then he was voted out. We can never forget that in the middle of a pandemic, 80 plus million people turned out to get rid of him. And that’s very rare in history where you interrupt an autocratic personality who’s in the middle of his project. And now the individual states are continuing this. And what’s so worrying is that they’re continuing it in a very accelerated fashion.
Voting him out was necessary, but insufficient. Trump continues to pour poison into the American body politic. I don’t want to wish Mussolini’s fate on Trump, so we’ll have to go with prosecution and conviction to get him off our hands.
There’s lots more Dr. Ben-Ghiat has to say, particularly about the rising threats posed by Abbott and especially DeSantis, which is another reason to go read the article. Trump made it acceptable for them to act the way they’re acting now. Putting Trump behind bars might give them pause, but more likely will cause them to double down.
I’ll close with three more observations from Dr. Ben-Ghiat. First:
I would say that nationally, we are a functioning democracy. That’s how we got rid of Trump. But the system has been eroded and many states are shifting, are evolving over time to a condition where votes are going to mean less.
That is, our federal/state system puts us in the unique position of being able to be a democratic AND autocratic nation. Aside from providing fodder for the next generation of history and political science PhD theses, this is a highly unstable situation that will have to fall out one way or the other. I know many people here don’t like talk of the United States splitting up, but this is more evidence that we may be heading there.
But in the meantime, here’s her second observation:
The wild card is guns. No other country in peace time has 400 million guns in private hands. And no other country in peacetime has militias allowed to populate, has sovereign sheriffs, has so many extremists in the military, and that matters because of these other things.
The right, the far right, and the far-side-of-the-moon right are armed to the teeth — though, based on their actions to date, they are as likely to shoot themselves in the teeth as to hit what they’re aiming at. The other side — by which I mean everyone who has a rational understanding of government — is not so well armed, though I would give more weight to the military defending democracy than she seems to. Still, it’s a factor we’ve been unsuccessfully trying to correct for the last 60 years or more.
Final observation. Asked what the Democrats are doing wrong, Dr. Ben-Ghiat said, as so many of us here are saying, “It’s the messaging, stupid!”
The reason that Trump was able to shift the political culture, Trump and his allies, is that he imposed an authoritarian party culture [with] unified messaging. Propaganda needs to be repeated with small variations. All the different Fox News hosts, all the GOP politicians, you can tell when the various talking points come up, because they get echoed by all these lawmakers and throughout Fox. Now Democrats by their nature are not going to impose unified messaging. And so Democrats don’t have that force of concentration of message, that repetition, and that’s a failing in this environment.