"Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present"
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
Alexandra Addison-Wrage of TRACE International
4.9 • 582 Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2021
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins the podcast to discuss her book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, which examines 100 years of authoritarian rule. She describes the characteristics of a strongman and the strange virility cult surrounding these leaders before turning to the central role of corruption in the autocrat's playbook.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexander Rogi, and today I'm speaking with Ruth Ben-Giatt. Ruth is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strong Men from Mussolini to the present, which examines 100 years of authoritarian rule. |
| 0:23.6 | She writes and speaks frequently on major media outlets |
| 0:26.6 | on threats to democracy around the world. |
| 0:28.6 | Ruth, thank you for joining me. |
| 0:30.6 | Thanks for having me on. |
| 0:32.6 | To frame this very large conversation, |
| 0:34.6 | can you walk us through at a high level your definition of a strong man? |
| 0:40.3 | What are the characteristics that you argue they have in common? |
| 0:44.7 | Strong men is a, I see them as a subset of authoritarian. And all authoritarian use this kind of |
| 0:51.2 | playbook, tools of rules that include propaganda, corruption, violence, |
| 0:57.8 | myth of national greatness. And the strong men also use machismo or virility, as I call it in the book. |
| 1:05.7 | So there are a subset of authoritarian who really make this kind of macho lawlessness central to their popular appeal. |
| 1:14.9 | They sometimes use their bodies as Putin who strips his shirt off in the Mussolini tradition. |
| 1:21.2 | But it's this machismo connects to all of the other tools. |
| 1:26.4 | And these are the central characteristics of the strong men. |
| 1:29.3 | Before we go on, because I want to circle back and talk about the virility aspect. It's a very strong theme through the book. But if we could digress for just a moment, you addressed this very early on in the book, but I think it's an important distinction. Why did you decide not to include nominally communist leaders |
| 1:46.1 | like Castro and Xi, for example? Many communists fit the mold of the strong men, but I was |
| 1:53.6 | interested in people who wrecked a democracy. Somebody like the leader of China, you know, |
| 2:00.5 | basically the system was already a closed |
| 2:02.4 | system and then they come in. And I wanted to look at system change. So for the most part, |
| 2:08.1 | they may come through fascist takeovers or military coups. Today they get to power by elections, |
| 2:14.2 | but I wanted to look at people who changed a political system for the most part. |
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