The Life and Afterlife of a Macho Government

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

Imagine a wealthy plutocrat with a history of media manipulation and an insatiable appetite. Now imagine he runs for head of state, despite having no political experience. His electoral base loves him, though he has no legislative accomplishments to name, and he has an ugly tendency to snuggle up to Vladimir Putin. Eventually his appetites overtake him, and he’s forced from power in disgrace, though he refuses to accept it.

Of course, I’m describing three-term Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

This book’s back-cover copy promises a “blueprint” for strongman leadership in one-man states throughout history. This is, however, somewhat misleading. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, admits unitary male leaders generally aren’t crafty men, and don’t necessarily have a shared playbook. They mostly roll with the punches, though their rapid adaptation tends to follow reliable patterns, which we, the socially engaged, can study.

Ben-Ghiat examines Twentieth and Twenty-First Century strongman autocrats. She defines strongmen as national leaders, usually though not necessarily male, who achieve power through exaggerated displays of traditionally masculine behaviors. Once in power, they rule through force of personality and brook no disagreement; most have no exit strategy, and leave power in disgrace, or worse. Ben-Ghiat doesn’t study Communist dictators, whose power machines behave, she says, differently.

Between the World Wars, strongmen generally achieved power through threats of violence. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini ever won elections, but both achieved power by stirring up angry crowds and threatening to turn them loose. Later, during the Cold War, strongmen like Augusto Pinochet, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Colonel Gadhafi led military coups. Recent strongmen, like Berlusconi, Putin, and Trump, have maintained the veneer of democracy, while disparaging its substance.

Strongmen generally gain their people’s acclamation and support (though not necessarily trust) by displaying strength and masculinity. Though only Mussolini and Putin regularly pose shirtless for photographers, coup leaders’ love of military uniforms and elaborate medals reflect their love of power displays. Many like to project images of themselves as brawlers, from Gadhafi issuing threats on state TV, to Trump fantasizing about punching protesters at campaign rallies.

This hypermasculine display results in contradictory relationships with women. Both Hitler and Saddam Hussein kept their private lives private; Hitler concealed his mistress, Eva Braun, from public view for years. Mussolini, however, pursued multiple women, whose brief assignations often turned into years-long surveillance operations. Gadhafi kept a brothel on a military base, often trafficking in arrested dissidents.

(Ben-Ghiat never mentions Stormy Daniels; she doesn’t have to.)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

These strongmen love touting their economic credentials. From claims that Mussolini’s trains ran on time, to supposed wealth generated in Pinochet’s Chile, to Mobutu’s lavish lifestyle, the centralized strongman state putatively creates unmatched wealth. Ben-Ghiat follows the actual money trail, however, and finds that these claims are mostly fictional. Economic gains, if there are any for anyone outside the strongman’s circle, are usually funded by catastrophic debt.

Mercifully, though the strongman projects a façade of invulnerability, he invariably faces massive opposition at home. Hitler survived multiple assassination attempts, and Mobutu regularly shuffled opposition politicians between his Cabinet and prison. Fascists and military strongmen generally leave office in chains, or else in a hearse. Elected strongmen like Berlusconi are more likely to be simply humiliated. Only Francisco Franco actually held power shrewdly enough to lie in state.

Though she avoids commenting on current events, except to provide historical perspective, there’s little doubt Ben-Ghiat writes this to highlight current power dynamics. Donald Trump repeatedly appears in direct parallels to historical strongmen in Ben-Ghiat’s narrative. Though his critics regularly call Trump a small-f fascist, in Ben-Ghiat’s telling, he more closely resembles Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi. Like them, he doesn’t realize how ridiculous he looks on the world stage.

Ben-Ghiat’s narrative focuses on finding parallels between strongman leaders, living or dead. She doesn’t perform deep dives into any individual. (She’s written previous books on Mussolini’s power techniques.) Late in the book, though, Ben-Ghiat admits these parallels are more coincidental than strategic. Strongmen govern in an improvisational style that manifests certain patterns, basically because humans respond to despots in reliable ways, and strongmen respond back.

Both the strongman’s supporters, and his critics, feel like the strongman’s reign is never-ending. Sometimes it indeed drags on. But the strongman inevitably falls, both from power and from his supporters’ good graces, and when he does, he invariably leaves his country poorer and more vulnerable, according to Ben-Ghiat. This final message is both optimistic and bleak, and citizens should plan accordingly.

The Fable of the King Who Would Not Die

Bryan Johnson: Meet the multi-millionaire trying to reverse ageing
—Headline on the BBC News website, 13 August 2023

Bryan Johnson

Once there was a certain king—a stupid ruler of a stupid kingdom, in a nation stuffed chock-a-block with stupid kingdoms and their useless kings. Every king in the nation, and many of the queens, thought themselves very important, because the nation had many town criers willing to ballyhoo the supposed importance of their particular monarch. These kings, and many subjects too, heard the ballyhooed fables so often, they came to believe their own mythology.

Like the myth of the king who ruled the kingdoms of lightning chariots and bluebirds. This king believed himself so important that, one day, he unilaterally declared he had renamed the bluebird kingdom, and henceforth, everyone had to honor his kingdom’s name. But every subject knew it was the kingdom of bluebirds, and called it such, ignoring what their king commanded except when his vast, and easily bruised, ego needed appeased. Which was fairly often.

Likewise, our certain king believed himself terribly important, and when he began hearing creaks from his vertebrae, and snaps from his knees, this king boldly proclaimed: “I shall not die!” The king gathered thirty physicians from throughout his kingdom and began dispensing gold generously, demanding research into diet and exercise, and into whatever alchemical potions the king could consume which would prevent his body from aging, and would keep Death, that eternal unwanted visitor, away.

Meanwhile this king’s subjects—we no longer call them “peasants,” though “peasants” is surely what they were—continued their labors. Some subjects hoed rows so they could plant and harvest wheat. Others smelted iron and brought the metal to the kingdom’s foundries, where blacksmiths forged implements so the field workers could hoe rows. The subjects needed little regular direction from their king, and besides, the king’s goldsmiths signed their pay slips, not the king himself.

Within the castle, the king continued demanding miracles from his physicians. “Make the potions stronger!” he commanded, for surely he saw grey beard hairs in his shaving mirror. His physicians bit their knuckles and wondered what more they could do. Saltpeter in his morning alchemical broth? Magnets on his free weights? Artists painted the king’s portrait with square jaw and bulging chest, but the king was not deceived, and knew he had not stopped age.

Elon Musk

Outside, town criers recounted breathlessly the accomplishments which the king and his physicians made in repelling death. Some subjects believed the stories, and repeated them widely, even unto the kingdom of bluebirds. But other subjects held aloft their iron implements and grumbled: “I care not. If he lives or dies, I must still gather the harvest. And look at this hoe! Barely had it, and already it’s rusty. No quality control in this kingdom anymore.”

Several of the king’s guards, watching from the castle, saw subjects raising their iron implements and grumbling, and this made them worry. The king waved away his guards’ concerns, however; what cared he for discontented peasants, when death still encroached? The captain of the guard wasn’t dissuaded, though, and prudently hired more guards, granting them more armor and more swords, because you cannot be too careful. And the stonemasons made the castle walls slightly higher.

All throughout, the king’s subjects continued improving their skills. The blacksmiths made ever-sharper hoes, which the field workers used to make ever-straighter rows, and thus the kingdom saw ever-increasing yields of bread. Admittedly, nobody had more gold to buy bread, so it rotted uneaten, but the bread existed, and surely that merited some celebration. The king permitted the goldsmiths to sign pay slips worth an extra ducat, or whatever, couldn’t everyone see he was busy?

Eventually the day came, which surely everyone must have expected, when the town criers announced that the king had died. Though they carried portraits of the king as square-jawed and muscular, everyone knew the magnets had made him addled, and the saltpeter had made his pecker drop off. Throughout the kingdom, sad-faced subjects agreed this was a most tragic day, then they turned back to their forges and their fields, because work still needed done.

Throughout our nation stuffed chock-a-block with stupid kingdoms, the death of one king mattered little. Workers still worked, and goldsmiths still banked, and everything carried on much as it had before. And somewhere, in a distant castle, the king of the bluebird kingdom struggled to invent another reason to postpone his cage match against that other weird king, Mark Zuckerberg, who, even in the world of allegory and fable, still looks like a pasty-faced android.

The Monster That Lives On the Homestead

Victor LaValle, Lone Women: a Novel

Adelaide Henry carries her family’s oldest secret in a steamer trunk when she hurriedly leaves California’s Lucerne Valley in 1915. Her parents’ sudden deaths leave Adelaide unmarried, Black, and a woman during a time in America’s history when these are among the three worst things a person could be. So she packs only what she can carry and flees to the one place that will take a fugitive like her: the rural northern Montana plains.

This novel began when author and Columbia University professor Victor LaValle discovered that Montana didn’t discriminate in distributing lands under the Homestead Act. Where most states and territories required a male head of household, and usually only accorded land to White people, Montana took anyone who could sign the paperwork. What, LaValle wondered, would drive a woman to Montana’s severe, dry climate? His apparent answer is: everything that’s the opposite of the traditional Western genre.

The Montana which Adelaide encounters doesn’t jibe with the enthusiastic railroad pamphlets that enticed her here. It’s dry, austere, and weatherbeaten. But word gets around quickly about the young Black woman living alone, and allies begin making themselves available. Seems Adelaide isn’t the only “Lone Woman” homesteading these prairies, which have offered a semi-warm welcome to outcasts of all kinds. As long as her deadly secret stays inside her steamer trunk, Adelaide should be fine.

LaValle upends the stereotypes of Western literature. The classic genre authors—Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour—praised White, male individualists who didn’t need anybody else, invented their own rules, and survived by violence. Many Westerns, including Wister’s genre-defining The Virginian, feature the protagonist losing their baggage, whether by having it stolen or by abandoning it along the Trails. By contrast, Adelaide’s baggage is the most important treasure she owns, and she’ll die defending it.

Adelaide’s baggage is both literal and metaphorical. She’s terrified of whatever lives inside her steamer trunk, and sings it lullabies to keep it mollified. But she also carries paralyzing guilt. From page one, we know Adelaide feels responsible for her parents’ violent deaths, which she flees in a literal blaze of fear. We don’t know who or what killed them, because she won’t tell us, because she won’t accept what really happened and face up.

Victor LaValle

But underneath Montana’s ceaseless skies, Adelaide discovers she isn’t alone. All the “Lone Women” have secrets they’d rather bury. But they also need each other—another stark reversal from the Western genre, which usually preaches radical self-reliance. Nobody in this Montana can survive alone. But that mutuality takes two different forms. While the homesteading Lone Women learn to trust one another, exactly as they are, the townspeople close ranks against those they regard as outsiders.

Meanwhile, whatever lives inside Adelaide’s steamer trunk dominates her life. Here, LaValle takes on Jungian subtexts, as we increasingly suspect Adelaide is harboring her shadow self. Though we don’t get a glimpse inside the steamer for eighty pages, the Thing We Don’t Talk About becomes larger and larger, until we know, with doomed inevitability, that Adelaide’s big secret will come crashing out. And when it does, it’s guaranteed to hurt everyone she’s dared to trust.

In this, LaValle acknowledges something traditional Westerns ignore: that the people who settled the American West weren’t heroes. They were mostly people without a homeland, often fugitives, who took land stolen from Native peoples because they’d lost everything else. (LaValle addresses the land theft only obliquely, but it’s there.) The West was alienating and lonely, and it destroyed American illusions of class and race. White America celebrated the first settlers only after they were dead.

Traditional Westerns feature protagonists, often nameless (“The Virginian”) or mononymic (“Lassiter”), who never completely tell their stories. The past, to Western heroes, doesn’t matter. By contrast, in LaValle’s Montana, the past is all-important. Adelaide and her allies try to bury their past, but in keeping their secrets, the past becomes all-encompassing, threatening to destroy any present they might have. Their epic becomes a matter of determining who they can trust, and what they can share.

This novel starts out as Adelaide’s story, and early on, hews closely to her. But our ability to see through others’ eyes blossoms outward to the exact extent that Adelaide learns to trust others. As she starts seeing other Montana homesteaders as equals, so do we, and we begin receiving their stories of heartbreak and recovery. We begin seeing how everyone has their own steamer trunk, literal and metaphorical. And we, too, learn to trust.

See also: You Should Be Reading Victor LaValle

The God of Justice, and the Justice of Humankind

Jesse Watters

“He just believed the election was stolen,” Jesse Watters said last week on his recently minted prime-time Fox News show. The “he” in this statement is, of course, former President Donald Trump, arraigned last week for his part in fomenting the January 6^th, 2021, insurgency. According to Watters, if Trump sincerely believed his legitimate reelection was stolen, violence was justified. As Watters and Greg Gutfeld both state, proving Trump didn’t believe this is nigh-on impossible.

Hearing this last week, I mentally time-traveled to President George W. Bush’s second term. As Operation Iraqi Freedom dragged on, suffering terrible mission drift and causing incalculable harm, a right-wing talking point arose that President Bush didn’t necessarily lie in falsely claiming Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction. Calling it a “lie,” conservative prognosticators claimed, implied Bush knew his statements were false. A “lie” wasn’t necessarily a false statement; lying required intent, which is unprovable.

In both cases, we witness conservative pundits defending Republican Presidents based not on actions, but belief. If President Bush believed, in the chambers of his heart, that WMDs existed, then he wasn’t morally culpable for deceit; he was as misled as the American people. (We now know this is measurably untrue.) Likewise, if President Trump legitimately believed the 2020 Electoral College outcomes were insidiously doctored, then his sincerity morally shields the legality of his actions.

We should immediately reject this argument. If one’s moral state protects the legality of one’s actions, then Americans would never prosecute minors as adults, even for violent crimes. Yet American prosecutors do this frequently, asserting that the heinousness of crimes committed by minors, especially Black minors, overrules the diminished moral capacity of youth. In these cases, action defines morality. But pundits claim that Presidents—America’s most morally culpable people—are somehow shielded by their sincerity.

Even beyond this prima facie contradiction, foregrounding belief unearths a vipers’ nest. It introduces a twisted variation on the Christian doctrine that only God knows the contents of a human soul. Despite what we’d sometimes prefer to believe, humans can neither let somebody into Heaven, nor condemn somebody to Hell; these options belong exclusively to God. Shifting the parameters away from what Bush or Trump did, to what they believed, makes justice a divine prerogative.

The Accused

At least nominally, jurisprudence focuses not on the defendant’s morals, but upon actions. Did the accused actually hurt, steal, or kill? We may consider aggravating factors, such as whether the violence seems disproportionate. Prosecutions for first-degree murder may consider whether the actions demonstrated “depraved disregard for human life,” as by elaborate advance planning or coordination. But even in these cases, we don’t question the impurity of the defendant’s soul, but the severity of their actions.

Using these standards, we can evaluate the Presidents’ actions, without considering their mental or spiritual state. Even if President Bush believed, with the solemnity of church, that Iraq possessed WMDs, members of his administration stated unequivocally that no such weapons existed. Bush notoriously overruled their objections. Likewise, Jack Smith’s indictment of President Trump takes Trump’s beliefs of the table in Paragraph 3; Smith spends 45 pages unpacking Trump’s actions, not his mental or spiritual state.

These right-wing pundits negate all questions of action by asking: do they know they’re committing a legal or moral crime? Even laying aside the base hypocrisy of the fact that they only apply this question to Presidents, they also replace a legal question with a theological question. They declare Presidents, or at least Republican Presidents, as members of the Elect, saved from earthly sin by God’s inscrutable movement. Their only judgement is the Final Judgement.

Earthly courts obviously cannot judge human hearts. That’s why jailhouse conversions usually don’t create thorny legal issues: if the incarcerated is legitimately penitent, well, the penitentiary has done its (supposed) job. Keep up the good work. Legitimately run courts, in the English Common Law tradition, care only about the accused’s actions—and, in Trump’s case, those actions played out on live television. Bad actions for benevolent reasons are still, in the court’s eyes, bad actions.

Even if this premise wasn’t bad-faith partisanship, we should still resist this intrusion of spiritual judgement into the earthly justice system. The law does not, indeed cannot, judge what happens inside a person’s heart or mind. Though courts have some latitude to judge purposes, for instance self-defense, these conditions should remain exceptional and rare. Once courts start judging anyone’s beliefs or intentions the state assumes God’s role. And that fact alone should cause bipartisan concern.

Neil Gaiman and the Road to Truth

Michael Sheen and David Tennant as Aziraphale and Crowley in Good Omens 2

This essay contains spoilers.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel Good Omens specifies that Aziraphale and Crowley, the angelic protagonists, don’t have a sexual relationship. Though Pratchett passed away in 2015, Gaiman maintained this parameter when adapting the novel for the 2019 BBC/Amazon joint production. Though he didn’t deny anybody their personal headcanon, he rejected the idea that Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship was anything but platonic.

Therefore it’s sudden and jarring in the final minutes of Good Omens 2 when (seriously, spoilers) Crowley grabs Aziraphale roughly and kisses him. This becomes the first moment that concretely sexualizes the characters. Throughout the season, Aziraphale and Crowley struggle to create a meet-cute between their neighbors, Nina and Maggie. But they’ve failed miserably because their knowledge of human romance comes entirely from Richard Curtis movies and Jane Austen novels.

Understanding the change requires understanding the context. Though Gaiman and Pratchett share billing on the original novel, Pratchett did most of the actual writing; Gaiman, a novice prose writer, wasn’t equipped to write an entire novel. Pratchett wanted to remain faithful to the Abrahamic mythology their novel satirized, which meant that transcendent beings lacked binary gender. To pinch a Kevin Smith line, angels are as sexless as Ken dolls.

Although Good Omens 2 is co-written by Gaiman and John Finnemore, it’s the first time the setting reflects exclusively Gaiman’s vision. And it bears noting Gaiman’s other recent streaming success: Sandman on Netflix. Not only does Sandman contain a noteworthy number of same-sex couples, Gaiman even gender-swaps John Constantine, a longstanding DC Comics character, to create increased Sapphic tension. Same-sex partnerships mean something to Gaiman.

In Sandman episode 5, Bette, a diner waitress, expresses purblind views about sexual identities. She claims Judy, a regular customer, is too pretty to be a lesbian, and engineers a meet-cute (another theme) with another customer, Mark. But when John Dee, empowered by Dream’s magic ruby, stops everyone lying and sheds their inhibitions, Bette and Judy find themselves entangled in a passionate embrace. That, the story implies, is their truth.

Throughout Sandman, Gaiman uses same-sex relationships as shorthand for characters who follow their own moral code. Johanna Constantine, Bette and Judy, Hal Carter, and Chantal and Zelda are all depicted as characters unbeholden to convention, free of judgement, and wholly alive. This freedom isn’t necessarily “good” in any moral sense, as The Corinthian’s ravenous sexuality is second only to his murderous impulses. But it does mean one is unbound.

Shelley Conn and John Hamm as Beelzebub and Gabriel in Good Omens 2

Good Omens depicts a world deeply bound to binaries. Good and evil, Heaven and Hell. We glimpse both eternal realms: Heaven is orderly, brightly lit, and aseptic, while Hell is noisy and cluttered, and several denizens show signs of gangrene. Both realms also keep demanding transcendent beings, like Aziraphale and Crowley, and their human allies, make binding declarations for one side or another. They demand complete moral absolutes.

Crowley and Aziraphale, however, spend the entire series finding ways to thread the moral needle. Both beings balk, for instance, at the biblical Job’s predicament, with its requirement to kill, and gradually devise a workaround. When they find an urchin robbing graves to escape poverty, Aziraphale learns that humans face degrees of wrong, while Crowley decides that death doesn’t resolve his sympathies. Broken moral bromides litter this story like flies.

Therefore, reaching the series culmination where (again, spoilers) the Metatron offers Aziraphale command of Heaven’s forces, this pushes the limits of Gaiman’s disdain for moral absolutes. By accepting the offer, Aziraphale must accept Heaven’s moral straight jacket, something Crowley can’t do. Crowley would rather continue mapping his own moral landscape, something both powers have done successfully for millennia. But, as Aziraphale notes, they have little to show for it.

Gaiman believes, from the textual evidence, that all absolute morals eventually collapse. But that doesn’t mean seeking one’s own moral resolution makes everything better. Johanna Constantine, John Dee, and now Aziraphale and Crowley have manufactured their own moralities, evidenced by their rejection of sexual identity myths, but they’re also terribly lonely. They occupy society’s margins, with only a few friends. Their stand requires courage and durability that most people lack.

Where Crowley kisses Aziraphale, therefore, it’s arguable whether the action is sexual. Maybe the characters remain, as both authors assert, essentially sexless. But Crowley demands, with his kiss, to know whether joining Heaven’s moral absolutes will, as Aziraphale claims, make a difference. Does morality, without context, mean anything? Neil Gaiman seemingly thinks not. Truth may be a lonely road, Gaiman suggests, but it’s the only one worth walking.