Ben-Ghiat, R. (2020) | References | Narcissus and the Child

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.

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

APA Citation