APA Citation
Ben-Ghiat, R. (2020). Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. W. W. Norton & Company.
Summary
Ruth Ben-Ghiat's research reveals that authoritarian strongmen from Mussolini to the present follow a remarkably consistent playbook regardless of their stated ideology. They cultivate images of hypermasculine dominance while simultaneously claiming victimhood. They corrupt democratic institutions from within. They use propaganda to create alternative realities. They designate enemies and deploy violence. And perhaps most disturbingly, their influence persists even after they leave power—what Ben-Ghiat calls 'authoritarian afterlife.' By examining a century of strongman rule across three continents, Ben-Ghiat identifies patterns that help explain why millions follow leaders who harm them, and what conditions allow these figures to rise.
Why This Matters for Survivors
For survivors of narcissistic abuse, Ben-Ghiat's research provides stunning recognition: the strongman's playbook is the narcissistic abuser's playbook scaled up to national politics. The grandiosity masked as victimhood, the reality distortion, the demand for absolute loyalty, the punishment of dissent, the designation of enemies to blame—these are the tactics you survived in your family, relationship, or workplace, now operating at civilisational scale. Understanding this parallel validates your pattern recognition. When political developments feel personally threatening, you're not being dramatic—you're recognising dynamics your nervous system learned to identify in order to survive. Ben-Ghiat's work also offers hope: strongmen are not invincible. They depend on specific conditions that can be addressed, and they have been defeated before.
What This Research Found
Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present provides the definitive comparative study of authoritarian leaders across a century and three continents, revealing the consistent patterns that unite figures from Mussolini and Hitler to Putin, Erdogan, and Trump. Her research demonstrates that strongman rule is not a series of isolated historical accidents but a recognisable political phenomenon that emerges under specific conditions, operates through predictable tactics, and produces characteristic damage—regardless of whether the leader comes from the political left or right, the developed or developing world, the past or present.
The strongman as type, not individual: Ben-Ghiat’s central methodological innovation is treating the strongman as a political type rather than studying individual authoritarian leaders in isolation. By examining dozens of cases across vastly different contexts, she identifies patterns that transcend individual personalities or ideologies. Mussolini’s fascist Italy, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, Gaddafi’s Libya, Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, and Trump’s America—these regimes differ enormously in ideology, culture, and historical context, yet their leaders deploy remarkably similar tactics. This consistency suggests that strongman rule emerges from structural requirements of consolidating absolute power, not from particular cultural or ideological sources.
The strongman playbook: Ben-Ghiat identifies consistent elements across her cases:
Machismo performance: Strongmen cultivate images of hypermasculine dominance through physical displays, sexual conquest narratives, and contempt for perceived weakness. This performance attracts followers who feel their own status threatened and establishes the leader as protector against designated threats.
Victimhood narratives: Despite holding or seeking enormous power, strongmen present themselves as victims of shadowy enemies. This “victimhood-to-vengeance pipeline” justifies aggression as defence and activates followers’ own grievances.
Corruption as statecraft: Unlike ordinary political corruption (officials enriching themselves despite rules), strongman corruption transforms rule-breaking into a governing principle. Loyalty is rewarded with access to resources; dissent is punished with exclusion. The system selects for those willing to participate in corruption, creating complicity that binds the regime together.
Propaganda and reality distortion: Strongmen don’t just lie; they create alternative information ecosystems that replace shared reality with the leader’s reality. The goal is not necessarily to make followers believe specific claims but to exhaust their capacity to distinguish true from false—gaslighting at civilisational scale.
Designated enemies and violence: Strongmen need enemies—whether ethnic minorities, political opponents, foreign threats, or internal “traitors.” These enemies provide explanation for every problem, justification for every power grab, and targets for the violence (symbolic, structural, or physical) that demonstrates the leader’s dominance and tests followers’ willingness to participate in cruelty.
The rise through democracy: Ben-Ghiat emphasises that modern strongmen typically rise through democratic systems rather than military coups. They’re invited in by existing elites who believe they can control or use them—then proceed to dismantle democratic constraints from within. This pattern makes strongman capture harder to resist than obvious authoritarian seizure: there’s no single moment when citizens must decide to accept or reject; instead, there’s gradual normalisation of previously unacceptable violations.
Authoritarian afterlife: One of Ben-Ghiat’s most important concepts is “authoritarian afterlife”—the persistence of strongman influence even after they leave power. The narcissist’s inability to accept defeat means they remain psychologically present: spreading disinformation, maintaining personality cults, working to undermine successors. The norms they violated don’t automatically recover; the institutions they damaged don’t instantly regenerate; the followers they radicalised don’t immediately deprogramme. This concept explains why societies recovering from strongman rule—like survivors recovering from narcissistic abuse—experience ongoing dysfunction even after the immediate threat passes.
The conditions of vulnerability: Ben-Ghiat identifies recurring conditions that make societies susceptible to strongman appeal: economic disruption that threatens status hierarchies; demographic change that activates identity anxiety; institutional weakness or corruption that discredits democratic alternatives; media environments that reward spectacle over substance; and historical trauma that hasn’t been integrated. These conditions create demand for what strongmen offer: certainty in uncertainty, enemies to blame, and participation in restored greatness.
How This Research Is Used in the Book
Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen appears at crucial points in Narcissus and the Child, particularly in Chapter 15: The Political Narcissus, where her research illuminates how narcissistic patterns operate at national scale. Her identification of the “victimhood-to-vengeance pipeline” explains the paradox of narcissistic leaders simultaneously claiming persecution and demanding worship:
“The first involves what Ben-Ghiat calls the ‘victimhood-to-vengeance pipeline.’ He found consistent narratives combining persecution and power. The leader claims to be simultaneously victim and victor, humiliated by enemies yet destined for greatness.”
This pattern—grandiosity combined with aggrieved victimhood—characterises narcissistic personality organisation at any scale. The strongman’s political version mirrors what survivors experienced from narcissistic parents who demanded both admiration for their superiority and sympathy for their suffering.
Ben-Ghiat’s concept of “authoritarian afterlife” provides the framework for understanding why societies don’t simply recover when narcissistic leaders depart:
“The departure of a narcissistic leader does not end their impact. Like family systems recovering from narcissistic abuse, democracies experience what Herman calls ‘post-traumatic stress’—ongoing dysfunction even after the immediate threat passes. The narcissist’s inability to accept defeat means they remain psychologically present even when formally absent from power, what Ben-Ghiat calls ‘authoritarian afterlife.’”
This parallel illuminates both political and personal recovery. The narcissistic family’s influence persists after the adult child leaves—in the internalised critic, the damaged relationships, the difficulty trusting one’s own perceptions. The strongman’s influence persists after they leave power—in the violated norms, the damaged institutions, the followers who remain radicalised. Both require active reconstruction, not just removal of the abuser.
The book draws on Ben-Ghiat’s observation that narcissistic leaders often precipitate their own downfall:
“Ben-Ghiat notes that narcissistic leaders often create their own downfall through the very grandiosity that brought them power.”
The same grandiosity that attracts followers—the certainty, the dominance displays, the refusal to acknowledge limits—eventually produces catastrophic miscalculations. Unable to receive accurate feedback, surrounded by sycophants, convinced of their own infallibility, narcissistic leaders make decisions that destroy them. This pattern repeats whether the narcissist is running a family, a company, or a country.
Why This Matters for Survivors
If you survived narcissistic abuse—whether from a parent, partner, or in the workplace—Ben-Ghiat’s research validates something you may have sensed: that the patterns you experienced aren’t confined to your family or relationship but operate at every scale of human organisation, including national politics.
Your pattern recognition is expertise, not paranoia. When political leaders display the same tactics you survived—the gaslighting, the victimhood that justifies aggression, the demand for absolute loyalty, the designation of enemies, the punishment of dissent—you’re not imagining parallels. Ben-Ghiat’s century of comparative evidence confirms that these patterns are structurally identical regardless of scale. The strongman who insists that documented events didn’t happen, who claims persecution while exercising dominance, who demands loyalty that supersedes loyalty to truth, who creates enemies to blame for every problem—this is the narcissistic abuser made political. Your experience gave you training in recognising these dynamics; your alarm response to political strongmen reflects that training, not oversensitivity.
The machismo is recognisable. Ben-Ghiat’s documentation of strongman machismo—the dominance displays, the contempt for vulnerability, the equation of cruelty with strength—describes the narcissistic posture you may have encountered regardless of your abuser’s gender. The narcissistic parent who couldn’t show weakness, who treated every situation as competition, who responded to vulnerability with contempt. The narcissistic partner whose identity required dominance. The narcissistic boss who needed to be seen as the strongest, smartest, most feared. This posture isn’t specifically masculine; it’s narcissistic. Ben-Ghiat shows how strongmen perform a specific version of this for political purposes, but the underlying psychology—the fragile grandiosity masked as invincible strength—is what survivors have always seen beneath the surface.
The victimhood explains the confusion. One of the most disorienting aspects of narcissistic abuse is the abuser’s simultaneous grandiosity and victimhood—the parent who demanded worship while claiming to be victimised by the family, the partner who exercised coercive control while insisting you were the real abuser. Ben-Ghiat’s “victimhood-to-vengeance pipeline” explains how this apparent contradiction actually works: the victimhood justifies the aggression (“I’m only fighting back”), deflects criticism as persecution (“They’re only attacking me because I threaten them”), and activates followers’ protective instincts. Understanding this mechanism helps make sense of what may have felt incomprehensible: how someone could simultaneously demand admiration for their power and sympathy for their suffering.
The afterlife is real. Ben-Ghiat’s concept of “authoritarian afterlife” validates what survivors know from experience: leaving doesn’t end it. The narcissistic parent’s voice persists as your internal critic. The narcissistic ex continues to influence your relationships and self-perception. The narcissistic boss’s management style shaped how you work long after you quit. The strongman who leaves power continues to distort reality, maintain a cult of personality, and undermine recovery. Both personal and political healing require recognising that the influence persists and actively rebuilding what was damaged—not just waiting for time to heal.
Resistance is possible. Ben-Ghiat ends Strongmen with analysis of how these figures have been defeated. Mussolini was executed by partisans. Hitler died in a bunker with his empire collapsing around him. Pinochet lost a referendum and faced prosecution. Trump lost re-election. Strongmen seem invincible but aren’t. They depend on compliance, on people going along out of enthusiasm, fear, or exhaustion. Every refusal to comply weakens the system. For survivors, this parallels the recognition that narcissists’ power depends on supply—on people providing the attention, admiration, and submission the narcissist requires. When supply is withdrawn, when victims refuse to play the assigned role, the narcissist’s apparent power collapses. Ben-Ghiat’s century of evidence demonstrates that collective resistance works; your individual recovery demonstrates the same principle at personal scale.
Clinical Implications
For psychiatrists, psychologists, and trauma-informed healthcare providers, Ben-Ghiat’s research has significant implications for understanding and treating patients affected by political developments that resonate with their personal abuse histories.
Political trauma is genuine trauma. Patients who report extreme distress about political strongmen—intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, sleep disturbance, difficulty functioning—may be experiencing trauma activation, not simply strong political opinions. When political leaders deploy tactics structurally identical to those the patient survived in abusive relationships, their nervous system responds to the genuine similarity. Ben-Ghiat’s documentation that these patterns are consistent across contexts validates patients’ perception that political and personal abuse are connected. Clinical assessment should explore whether political distress activates personal trauma history.
The compound trauma of historical memory. For patients whose families experienced authoritarian regimes, political strongmen may activate intergenerational trauma. The patient whose grandparents survived Mussolini, whose parents fled Pinochet, whose family remembers Stalin—they carry trauma patterns shaped by strongman rule even if they didn’t experience it directly. Ben-Ghiat’s comparative framework helps contextualise this: the patterns are genuinely similar because strongmen operate similarly regardless of era or location. The patient’s family recognised the pattern; the patient may inherit that recognition along with the associated activation.
Understanding followers in clinical context. Clinicians increasingly encounter patients whose family members have become devoted followers of political strongmen. Ben-Ghiat’s analysis of how strongmen build followings—through victimhood narratives that validate grievance, through participation in grandiosity, through enemy designation that channels anxiety into hatred—helps clinicians understand these family members without pathologising them. The follower is receiving real psychological benefits from the strongman’s movement: certainty, belonging, vicarious greatness, clear enemies to blame. Understanding what the political involvement provides helps clinicians work with patients navigating these family relationships, and potentially with followers who seek treatment after disillusionment.
The machismo presentation in male patients. Ben-Ghiat’s documentation of strongman machismo—the dominance displays, the contempt for vulnerability, the equation of cruelty with strength—describes a presentation clinicians may encounter in male patients, particularly those raised in environments where such postures were modelled and rewarded. Patients presenting with rigid masculine performance, inability to show vulnerability, contempt for perceived weakness in self or others may be manifesting patterns learned from strongman-influenced environments or from narcissistic family members who deployed similar tactics. Treatment involves helping patients recognise these patterns as defensive adaptations, not authentic expressions of masculinity.
Validating patient expertise. Survivors of narcissistic abuse often feel dismissed when they identify political leaders as narcissistic—told they’re projecting, being dramatic, or making everything personal. Ben-Ghiat’s research provides scholarly validation: the patterns are genuinely similar because the psychology is structurally equivalent. Clinicians can support patients by acknowledging their pattern recognition as expertise rather than projection. The patient who immediately recognised a political figure as narcissistic—before the figure had accumulated the track record that convinced others—was perceiving accurately. That perception deserves clinical respect.
Broader Implications
Ben-Ghiat’s research illuminates patterns that extend far beyond individual political leaders, revealing connections between personal, familial, organisational, and national levels of narcissistic dysfunction.
The Structural Equivalence of Narcissistic Systems
Ben-Ghiat’s comparative method—examining strongmen across vastly different contexts to identify consistent patterns—demonstrates that narcissistic dynamics operate structurally regardless of scale. The tactics that work for dominating a family work for dominating a company work for dominating a nation. Gaslighting, splitting, projection, scapegoating, triangulation, reality distortion, demands for loyalty over truth—these appear wherever someone seeks total control. Understanding this structural equivalence helps explain why survivors recognise political patterns and why personal recovery skills transfer to political resistance.
Machismo Beyond Gender
Ben-Ghiat’s analysis of strongman machismo illuminates narcissistic presentation beyond the specific political context. The dominance displays, the contempt for vulnerability, the need to be seen as strongest and best—these characterise narcissistic self-presentation regardless of the narcissist’s gender. Female narcissists may deploy different content, but the underlying structure—fragile grandiosity defended through domination—remains. Ben-Ghiat’s documentation of how this presentation serves political functions (attracting followers who feel their status threatened, establishing dominance hierarchies, justifying aggression as strength) helps explain how similar presentations function in family and workplace contexts.
The Media Ecosystem and Narcissistic Supply
Ben-Ghiat’s analysis of propaganda illuminates how media environments can enable or constrain narcissistic capture. The strongman depends on communication channels that amplify grandiose self-presentation, transmit reality distortion, and mobilise followers. When media ecosystems reward outrage and spectacle, they inadvertently create perfect conditions for narcissistic exploitation. The attention economy provides exactly what narcissists need: narcissistic supply at scale. Understanding this helps explain not just political strongmen but the visibility of narcissistic personalities across social media—the incentive structures select for and reward narcissistic self-presentation.
Elite Complicity and Enabling
Ben-Ghiat documents that strongmen typically rise not through force but through elite complicity—existing power holders who believe they can use or control the aspiring strongman. This pattern parallels enabling in family systems: the non-abusive parent who doesn’t protect children from the narcissistic parent, the family members who maintain the code of silence, the colleagues who excuse the narcissistic boss’s behaviour. In both political and personal contexts, the narcissist’s power depends on others going along—actively enabling or passively permitting. Breaking complicity is essential to both political and personal resistance.
Conditions of Vulnerability
Ben-Ghiat identifies specific conditions that create vulnerability to strongman appeal: economic disruption, demographic change, institutional weakness, media fragmentation, unprocessed historical trauma. These same conditions—at family scale—create vulnerability to narcissistic dynamics. The family under economic stress, experiencing demographic transition (children leaving, divorce, death), with weak boundaries and communication dysfunction, carrying trauma from previous generations—this family is vulnerable to narcissistic capture by any member willing to exploit these conditions. Understanding conditions of vulnerability suggests prevention strategies: addressing underlying anxieties reduces susceptibility to narcissistic appeals at any scale.
Recovery as Active Reconstruction
Ben-Ghiat’s concept of “authoritarian afterlife” emphasises that strongmen’s influence persists after they leave power, requiring active reconstruction rather than passive waiting for normalcy to return. This matches what trauma researchers have documented about personal recovery: leaving an abusive relationship doesn’t automatically heal the damage; the violated boundaries must be consciously rebuilt, the internalised critic actively countered, the damaged capacity for trust deliberately restored. Both political and personal recovery involve recognising that damage persists beyond the abuser’s presence and committing to the work of reconstruction.
Limitations and Considerations
Ben-Ghiat’s influential work has important limitations that inform how we apply it.
The selection of cases: Ben-Ghiat focuses on the most prominent and destructive strongmen—Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, Trump. These extreme cases clearly demonstrate the patterns she identifies, but the framework may be less useful for distinguishing concerning leaders from ordinary politicians in less extreme cases. Not every confident, combative politician is a strongman; not every boundary violation signals authoritarian capture. The pattern recognition the book enables risks over-application.
The psychology-politics intersection: While Ben-Ghiat draws on psychological concepts (narcissism, machismo, victimhood), she is a historian, not a psychologist. Her application of psychological frameworks to political leaders involves interpretation across disciplines. Clinicians should treat her psychological characterisations as informed observation rather than clinical assessment. The patterns she identifies are real; the underlying psychological mechanisms may be more complex than the political analysis captures.
The American context: Though Strongmen covers a century and multiple continents, its publication timing and prominent discussion of Trump positions it partly as commentary on American politics. Readers outside the US context may find some analysis less directly applicable, and the Trump material may date more quickly than the historical analysis.
Structural versus individual explanations: Ben-Ghiat’s emphasis on the strongman as type—emerging under specific conditions, deploying predictable tactics—may understate individual variation. Different leaders with similar patterns may prove more or less susceptible to constraint, more or less willing to accept electoral defeat, more or less capable of the extreme violence that characterised the worst cases. The pattern predicts direction but not magnitude.
Hope and determinism: Ben-Ghiat argues that strongmen can be resisted and have been defeated, offering cautious hope. But she also documents how consistently the pattern recurs despite historical awareness. Whether societies can actually learn from history—whether knowing the strongman playbook enables effective resistance—remains uncertain. The pattern’s persistence despite recognition suggests structural conditions that remain inadequately addressed.
Historical Context
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present appeared in November 2020, during the final months of the Trump presidency and amid widespread concern about global democratic erosion. Ruth Ben-Ghiat had been developing her analysis for decades—her first book, on Italian fascism, appeared in 2001—but the political moment gave scholarly work immediate public relevance.
Ben-Ghiat’s perspective is shaped by her expertise in Italian fascism and Mussolini specifically. This grounding in the first modern fascist state—the laboratory where propaganda techniques, machismo performance, and corruption-as-statecraft were developed and later copied by Hitler and others—gives her analysis historical depth that purely contemporary commentary lacks. She sees present-day strongmen as inheritors of techniques developed a century ago, continuously refined but fundamentally unchanged.
The book synthesises three types of evidence: historical documentation of twentieth-century authoritarianism, contemporary reporting on present-day strongmen, and comparative analysis identifying patterns across cases. This mixed method allows Ben-Ghiat to demonstrate both the specific details of individual regimes and the consistent patterns that unite them. The comparative scope is the book’s distinctive contribution—studies of individual strongmen are abundant, but comprehensive comparative analysis across eras and ideologies is rare.
Strongmen quickly found both academic and popular audiences. It appeared on numerous best-of-2020 lists, was translated into multiple languages, and established Ben-Ghiat as a prominent public voice on authoritarianism—a role she continues through media commentary and her newsletter Lucid. The book’s influence extends beyond academic citation to shape public discourse about democratic erosion and political narcissism.
For scholars of narcissism, Ben-Ghiat’s work provides essential historical context: the patterns clinicians identify in individuals and families have appeared at civilisational scale, with catastrophic consequences. For survivors of narcissistic abuse, it offers validation: the dynamics they experienced are not private pathology but recognised mechanisms of domination that have been studied, understood, and resisted. For citizens concerned about democracy, it provides both warning and hope: the patterns are dangerous but recognisable, the damage is real but resistable. Strongmen have risen before; they have also fallen.
The Survivor’s Recognition
For those who experienced narcissistic abuse, reading Ben-Ghiat often produces the same shock of recognition that clinical literature provides—but at a different scale. The strongman who can never be wrong, who experiences any disagreement as persecution, who demands loyalty that supersedes loyalty to truth, who designates enemies to blame for every problem, who gaslights entire populations about documented reality—this is the narcissistic parent or partner made political. The tactics are identical because the underlying psychology is structurally equivalent.
The victimhood-to-vengeance pipeline that Ben-Ghiat identifies explains what survivors experienced but may not have had language for: the abuser who simultaneously demanded worship for their superiority and sympathy for their suffering. The narcissistic parent who claimed to sacrifice everything for the family while treating the family as audience for their grievances. The narcissistic partner who exercised coercive control while insisting they were the real victim. The strongman’s political version of this dynamic—claiming persecution while exercising dominance—operates through identical mechanisms.
The machismo that Ben-Ghiat documents is the narcissistic posture made explicit: the equation of strength with cruelty, the contempt for vulnerability, the need to be seen as dominant. Survivors may recognise this not as specifically masculine but as narcissistic—the posture that their female narcissistic mother adopted as surely as the political strongman does. The content differs (motherly sacrifice versus masculine dominance) but the structure matches: grandiosity defended through domination, vulnerability hidden behind aggression.
The authoritarian afterlife that Ben-Ghiat identifies validates what survivors know from experience: leaving doesn’t end it. The narcissistic parent’s influence persists as the internalised critic, the damaged capacity for trust, the difficulty knowing what you actually feel and want. Years after no contact, survivors report hearing the parent’s voice, feeling watched, second-guessing perceptions the way they learned to under the parent’s reality distortion. The strongman’s influence persists through violated norms, damaged institutions, and radicalised followers who don’t simply disappear when the leader leaves. Both personal and political recovery require recognising that healing is active reconstruction, not passive waiting.
Ben-Ghiat’s documentation of how strongmen have been defeated—through collective resistance, institutional resilience, and the hubris that eventually produces catastrophic miscalculation—offers hope that parallels personal recovery. The narcissist seems invincible but isn’t. Their power depends on supply, on compliance, on people going along. When enough people refuse, the apparent invincibility collapses. Survivors who’ve watched narcissistic family members or partners unravel when supply is withdrawn know this dynamic; Ben-Ghiat demonstrates it operating at national scale. The strongman falls the same way the narcissistic parent’s control ends—not through the narcissist changing but through the system around them withdrawing the compliance that sustained the dysfunction.
What survivors bring to Ben-Ghiat’s analysis is not just recognition but expertise. Having survived intimate exposure to narcissistic dynamics, they understand intuitively what the book documents historically: that these patterns are not random individual pathology but systematic mechanisms of domination; that the tactics serve the function of maintaining control; that the cruelty is the point, not an unfortunate side effect; and that recovery requires not just removing the abuser but actively rebuilding what the abuse destroyed. This expertise—earned through suffering, validated by scholarship—positions survivors to both recognise and resist strongman politics in ways that those without such experience cannot.
Further Reading
- Ben-Ghiat, R. (2001). Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945. University of California Press.
- Ben-Ghiat, R. (2015). Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema. Indiana University Press.
- Levitsky, S. & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die. Crown.
- Post, J.M. (2004). Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior. Cornell University Press.
- Stanley, J. (2018). How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Random House.
- Snyder, T. (2017). On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books.
- Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
- Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.
- Lifton, R.J. (1961). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Norton.
- Lipman-Blumen, J. (2005). The Allure of Toxic Leaders. Oxford University Press.
- Altemeyer, B. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Harvard University Press.
- Herman, J.L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books.
Abstract
Drawing on a century of authoritarian history across continents, Ruth Ben-Ghiat identifies the recurrent patterns that strongman leaders share regardless of ideology or era. From Mussolini and Hitler to Putin and Trump, these figures deploy remarkably consistent tactics: machismo performance, victimhood narratives, corruption as statecraft, propaganda machines, and systematic violence against designated enemies. Ben-Ghiat introduces the concept of 'authoritarian afterlife'—the persistence of strongman influence even after they leave power—and shows how their tactics create damage that outlasts their rule. The book reveals that strongmen are not aberrations but products of specific conditions that societies can learn to recognise and resist.
About the Author
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University, where she has taught for over two decades. Her research focuses on fascism, authoritarianism, and propaganda, with particular expertise in Italian fascism under Mussolini and its influence on subsequent authoritarian movements.
Ben-Ghiat earned her PhD from Brandeis University and has held fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the author of several influential books, including Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (2001) and Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema (2015).
Beyond academic work, Ben-Ghiat writes regularly for CNN, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post on contemporary authoritarianism. She publishes the newsletter Lucid, which analyses authoritarian tactics and democratic resistance, and has become a prominent public voice on the patterns connecting historical and contemporary strongman rule. Her ability to illuminate present-day politics through historical analysis has made her one of the most cited scholars on authoritarianism in mainstream media.
Historical Context
Published in November 2020, *Strongmen* appeared at a moment of acute concern about democratic erosion globally. Ben-Ghiat had been developing her analysis for years, but the Trump presidency gave her scholarly work immediate public relevance. The book synthesises her decades of research on Italian fascism with analysis of authoritarian movements across continents and eras—from Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet to Gaddafi, Putin, Erdogan, and Trump. This comparative scope distinguishes her work from studies focused on single leaders or regions. Ben-Ghiat's identification of consistent patterns across vastly different contexts suggests that strongman rule emerges from predictable conditions and operates through recognisable tactics—insights with implications for both understanding the past and resisting present-day authoritarianism. The book quickly became essential reading for those seeking to understand the apparent global rise of authoritarian politics.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ben-Ghiat defines strongmen as authoritarian leaders who cultivate a personal brand of hypermasculine dominance while claiming victimhood, corrupt institutions from within rather than through military coups, and maintain power through a combination of propaganda, personality cult, and selective violence. Unlike traditional dictators who seize power through force, modern strongmen often rise through democratic systems they then dismantle from within. They share common traits regardless of ideology: the performance of virile masculinity, victimhood narratives that justify aggression, the use of corruption as a governing tool, propaganda operations that create alternative realities, and violence against designated enemies. This pattern appears across the political spectrum—in fascists like Mussolini, communists like Mao, military dictators like Pinochet, and elected populists like Orban. The consistent playbook suggests these aren't just individual pathologies but a recognisable type of political actor that emerges under specific conditions.
Authoritarian afterlife is Ben-Ghiat's term for the persistence of strongman influence even after they leave power. Defeated strongmen don't simply disappear; they remain psychologically present, often maintaining active cults of personality, spreading disinformation, and working to undermine their successors. The norms they violated don't automatically recover; the institutions they damaged don't instantly regenerate; the reality distortion they created continues to shape public consciousness. This concept appears in Narcissus and the Child to explain why democracies experience 'post-traumatic stress' after narcissistic leadership—ongoing dysfunction even after the immediate threat passes. For abuse survivors, this parallels how narcissistic influence persists after you've physically left: the voice in your head, the damaged relationships, the difficulty trusting your own perceptions. Both personal and political recovery require actively rebuilding what was damaged, not just removing the abuser.
Ben-Ghiat's comparative research reveals that the strongman playbook emerges from the psychological requirements of maintaining absolute power, not from any particular ideology. Left-wing and right-wing strongmen deploy identical tactics because those tactics work for consolidating control regardless of political content. They need victimhood narratives to justify aggression ('we're the real victims, so our violence is defensive'). They need enemies to blame for problems they can't solve. They need propaganda to create realities where they're always right. They need corruption to reward loyalty and punish dissent. They need violence (or its credible threat) to maintain fear. These needs are structural—any leader seeking total control faces them. The ideology provides the content (who the enemies are, what the victimhood story claims), but the form remains constant. This is why survivors of narcissistic abuse recognise the pattern immediately regardless of the strongman's stated politics—the tactics are the same ones they experienced at intimate scale.
Ben-Ghiat documents how strongmen across cultures perform a specific type of hypermasculinity that serves political functions beyond personal ego. The shirtless photos (Putin), the military posturing (Mussolini), the boasts about physical dominance (Trump)—these aren't incidental vanities but deliberate performances that communicate power, attract certain followers, and establish dominance hierarchies. This machismo serves several functions: it appeals to followers who feel their own masculine status threatened by social change; it establishes the leader as protector against designated threats; it provides pretext for aggression framed as strength rather than cruelty; and it creates a contrast with opponents portrayed as weak or effeminate. The performance often includes sexual conquest narratives—affairs, groping, crude remarks about women—which communicate that normal rules don't apply to the strongman. For survivors of narcissistic abuse, this machismo is recognisable as the same dominance display that characterised their abuser, whether male or female: the need to be seen as powerful, the contempt for vulnerability, the equation of cruelty with strength.
Ben-Ghiat identifies several conditions that create vulnerability to strongman appeal: economic disruption that threatens status hierarchies; demographic change that activates identity anxiety; institutional weakness or corruption that discredits democratic alternatives; media environments that amplify outrage and spectacle; and historical trauma that hasn't been processed. Crucially, strongmen rarely seize power through force—they're typically invited in by existing elites who believe they can control or use them. Prevention therefore involves: addressing economic anxiety so people don't seek simple answers to complex problems; strengthening institutions before they're tested; maintaining media ecosystems that reward accuracy over engagement; and elite responsibility to refuse to legitimate authoritarian actors even when politically convenient. Ben-Ghiat emphasises that strongmen are not inevitable products of their societies but specific actors who exploit specific vulnerabilities. Understanding the pattern helps societies build immunity—not perfect immunity, but meaningful resistance.
Ben-Ghiat distinguishes strongman propaganda from normal political communication by its relationship to truth. Ordinary politicians spin, exaggerate, and selectively present facts—but they operate within a shared reality where their claims can be evaluated. Strongman propaganda aims to destroy shared reality itself. It doesn't just lie; it creates alternative information ecosystems where the leader's version of events is the only version that matters. The goal isn't necessarily to make followers believe specific falsehoods but to exhaust their capacity to distinguish true from false—what Hannah Arendt called creating subjects who 'no longer know the difference between fact and fiction.' This is gaslighting at civilisational scale. Mussolini's propaganda machine, Hitler's Ministry of Propaganda, Putin's disinformation operations, Trump's 'fake news' attacks—all serve the same function: replacing shared reality with the leader's reality. For abuse survivors, this is immediately recognisable as the same dynamic that operated in their families: the abuser's version of events becoming the only permissible version.
Ben-Ghiat documents that violence—or its credible threat—remains central to strongman rule even when the leader rises through democratic means. This violence operates on a spectrum: from symbolic violence (degrading rhetoric, humiliation of opponents) through structural violence (using state power to harm designated groups) to physical violence (tacitly endorsed vigilante attacks, state-sponsored killings). The violence serves multiple functions: it demonstrates the leader's willingness to use force; it tests followers' willingness to accept or participate in cruelty; it eliminates enemies and intimidates potential opponents; and it creates complicity that binds followers more tightly. Crucially, strongmen typically don't dirty their own hands—they create environments where followers carry out violence on their behalf, then either tacitly endorse or strategically disavow it. This pattern of delegated violence with plausible deniability appears across Ben-Ghiat's cases from Mussolini's blackshirts to contemporary vigilante movements. For abuse survivors, this echoes the narcissistic abuser's use of flying monkeys and triangulation—getting others to do the dirty work.
Ben-Ghiat identifies the 'victimhood-to-vengeance pipeline' as central to strongman appeal. Despite holding or seeking enormous power, strongmen consistently present themselves and their followers as victims of shadowy enemies—elites, foreigners, minorities, the deep state. This victimhood narrative serves crucial functions: it justifies aggressive actions as defensive ('we're fighting back, not attacking'); it deflects criticism as persecution ('they're only attacking me because I threaten them'); it activates followers' own sense of grievance and threat; and it creates the emotional intensity that fuels political mobilisation. The paradox of claiming victimhood while exercising dominance is only apparent—it reflects the narcissistic structure where grandiosity and fragility coexist. The strongman is simultaneously the most powerful and the most persecuted, deserving of worship and protection alike. This pattern appears in Narcissus and the Child as characteristic of narcissistic leadership: the leader claims to be simultaneously victim and victor, humiliated by enemies yet destined for greatness.
Ben-Ghiat concludes Strongmen with analysis of how these figures have been resisted and defeated. Individual actions matter: refusing to normalise violations of democratic norms; maintaining independent sources of information; building solidarity across the divisions strongmen exploit; supporting independent media and civil society; and participating in collective resistance through protest, organisation, and voting. Crucially, she emphasises that strongmen depend on compliance—their power rests on people going along, whether from enthusiasm, fear, or exhaustion. Every refusal to comply weakens the system. However, Ben-Ghiat also emphasises that individual action is necessary but not sufficient; structural changes—electoral reforms, media regulation, institutional strengthening—are required to address the conditions that allow strongmen to rise. For survivors of narcissistic abuse, this parallels recovery: individual boundary-setting matters enormously, but healing also requires building support systems and, where possible, changing the structures that enabled the abuse.