Big Question | What Is the Allure of the Strongman?

Moisés Naím is a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author, most recently, of The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century. In the 1990s he served as Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry, as director of Venezuela’s Central Bank and as executive director of the World Bank.

A “strongman” (or woman) is somebody who rules a country by undermining and weakening rules, regulations, constitutional mandates and restrictions. And often that’s done very stealthily. Before, we had the old kind of strongman, the Mobutus of the world, the Francos, the Hitlers. And then there is the 21st-century strongman or strongwoman, who initially gets elected as prime minister or president or whatever. Normally the election is more or less fair. But the moment they get into power, they start making decisions to undermine the checks and balances that define a democracy.
What is interesting are not the specificities of any one strongman but how surprisingly similar they are—even if they are completely different in terms of culture, history, economics and foreign relations. They behave in similar ways, which are driven by what I call the “Three P’s”: populism, polarization and post-truth. These are tactics that have always existed, but in the 21st century they have become the central strategy of a great many governments around the world.

Populism is a political posture of divide and conquer. The strongman promises all kinds of good things to the poor as he points to the elite that manages the country and says, “They are against you!” The idea is to create a wedge in society. It could be along racial or religious or economic or social lines. Polarization has a lot to do with identity politics—whether you are part of a family, a tribe, a community and so on. Both populism and polarization have been greatly magnified by technology platforms and social media posts. These sustain the third “P,” post-truth. Before, we had propaganda or just plain demagoguery. Now, thanks to their proliferation through social media and other platforms, you don’t know who to believe, what to believe, who to ask. The truth doesn’t really matter.

For the strongman, political opponents are not just competitors, they’re criminals. Strongmen build up external threats, such as immigrants and crumbling national borders. They employ militarization and para-militarization. They denigrate experts and attack and undermine the media. In a sense, they promise messianic deliverance.

Interestingly, when I do book talks and describe the strongman or antidemocratic autocrat, everybody believes the description I give is based on their country’s leader. Israelis think this. So do Italians, Spaniards, Colombians and Indonesians. It’s fascinating to discover that you can explain this as a global trend, but very often it is not sufficiently recognized as such.

Kati Marton is a Hungarian-born author and journalist. She is currently working on her eleventh book, provisionally entitled Herzl Reconsidered.

We appear to have a rash of strongman autocrats who seem to tap into something primal in us—a need for belonging, a tribalism that goes way back to the campfire, to our origins. The world is a scary place now. In the last few years, the tectonic plates of civilization have shifted dramatically. And there are people who feel extremely alienated from that new world and have lost a sense of belonging, which is what strongmen promise. And they do that, frankly, by appealing to people’s worst instincts. But let’s face it, we all, somewhere deep down in our souls, have primal instincts. We’ve seen this not only in the United States, but in the Middle East, Africa and parts of South Asia.

They re-edit, revise, re-mythologize their own history to make it seem as if there was a golden age, when in fact no country has ever had a real golden age.

Now we see it in the heart of Europe, where the looming strongman Vladimir Putin has inspired sort of Mini-Me strongmen to follow his script, which is to turn back the clock to a time that never existed, to rewrite history as if the Russian people have always been alienated from the world, and that only he, Putin, can protect and defend them. Viktor Orbán is doing this in Hungary, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan is doing it in Turkey. They re-edit, revise, re-mythologize their own history to make it seem as if there was a golden age, when in fact no country has ever had a real golden age. History is full of bloodshed and strife and one team up, the other down. But it’s easy to sell the golden era idea to people who are looking for something to hold onto in a world that’s dominated by change. Not only technological change, but change related to gender, which is disturbing to a lot of people, and racial change coinciding with the largest migration in history going on, which means no country is homogeneous in its population any longer. People who haven’t really been able to absorb these changes feel threatened, insecure and alienated.

These strongman characters—Erdogan, Orbán, Putin and Trump, as well as Narendra Modi in India and Giorgia Meloni in Italy—all appear to be operating from the same playbook. “Tell the folks what you think they want to hear,” it reads. Which is: “We’re better than everybody else and we don’t need the world. I will be your defender against the incursions of this very strange, disturbing and incomprehensible new reality.” So, it’s a defense against modernity and an escape into the past.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / Jacques-Louis David

Another thing these strongmen have in common is that they all need demons to fire up their base. And one of their demons of choice, bizarrely, is a man who’s approaching his 100th birthday: George Soros. Orbán owes his Oxford University education to a Soros scholarship, but he vilifies him. Even Trump named Soros in his diatribe after his conviction in New York City. You might think they’d want to find fresh meat to throw at their base, but Soros stands for everything that is threatening to them. First of all, he’s a capitalist, he’s also enormously successful, and, let’s face it, he’s Jewish. And what is shameful is that Benjamin Netanyahu and Orbán agree about Soros being the enemy. These people are utterly cynical. They are about one thing: self-preservation and staying out of jail.

On the good news front, however, the recent elections in India dealt them all a blow. Modi barely scraped by—having done everything that all these other characters have done to stay in office: eliminating independent media, weakening the judiciary and giving their buddies all the plum enterprises and making their friends rich and beholden to them. Putin’s done this, Orbán’s done this. And Trump: Look at Jared Kushner’s multi-million-dollar deal with the Saudis. So, let us praise the Indian voters, who, against terrific odds and so much disinformation and hate (anti-Muslim hate, because of course Modi is a Hindu nationalist), prevailed and from whom we should draw encouragement. Because when one strongman is down, they all feel it.

Ultimately, strongmen do fall, because they are made of the same mortal stuff as the rest of us. But waiting for that to happen isn’t the answer. We have to be smart and assertive and aggressive in fighting for our values. My parents’ and my grandparents’ generations did not do that sufficiently because they lived in a state of delusion and then woke up one day to find their world gone. I’m speaking of my Hungarian Jewish grandparents who perished in Auschwitz and my parents, who only survived because they were hidden by Christians in Budapest but who, until the very end, considered themselves Hungarian patriots, even when their fellow Hungarians no longer considered them such.

Those of us who are children and grandchildren of the Holocaust should be at the forefront of defending democracy, and by that I mean the rule of law and respect for election results, for starters. We can’t go on an extended vacation and hope for the best the way my parents and my grandparents did in Budapest.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at NYU whose latest book is Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present. She is an MSNBC contributor and publishes the Substack newsletter Lucid on threats to democracy in the United States and abroad.

It’s a bleak world, the strongman’s world, so it’s very relevant and important to understand who these figures are, what they’re capable of and why people follow them.

I see strongmen as a subset of authoritarians, all of whom want to expand the executive branch until it overwhelms the legislature and the judiciary so that there are no checks on them. A strongman is more specifically a personalist ruler, whereby everything is turned into a tool to satisfy his own legal, financial and personality needs. And in personalizing everything, a strongman creates the leader cult.

The other criterion for a strongman is a kind of machismo, or virility. These are leaders who use their bodies and their masculine brutalism to present their power and advertise themselves as superior. They’re a man of the people and the man above all other men. In a way, it’s charm or charisma. Mobutu in Congo was deadly charming. Benito Mussolini was a serial rapist but had some kind of charm. And while strongmen have that je ne sais quoi of charisma, they also work at it because they need the adoration of the crowd. As per 20th-century German sociologist Max Weber’s analysis of charisma, these leaders are weak, brittle, insecure people who need to be adored. So, once they take power, they invest a huge amount of state resources putting their body and face everywhere, obsess about crowd size and so on.

Many of the most successful strongman leaders have had backgrounds as communicators. Mussolini, for example, was a journalist, and his fellow Italian Silvio Berlusconi was a TV entertainer. They’re performers who cultivate a direct relationship with the crowd. Hitler hired a photographer in the 1920s and practiced his gestures. He took voice and hypnotism lessons. The Nazis invested in state-of-the-art sound engineering and special speakers for rallies so that his voice would reverberate, the idea being it would go straight to the heart. People would say they felt like Hitler was talking only to them, articulating things they felt but didn’t know how to express. The same has been said for Modi in India and for Trump in America, because they use emotion and put on dazzling spectacles. Erdogan in Turkey does something I call strategic crying. If his poll numbers are falling, or if he’s in the middle of some kind of repression, which is often now, he cries on camera. And so, people think the strongman is authentic. And when they have bonded with the strongman, he doesn’t just represent the nation, he embodies it.

Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H1216-0500-002 (CC-BY-SA 3.0) / Wikimedia Commons / www.kremlin.ru

The other very important part of the emotional ploy is victimhood. Playing the victim demonizes the strongman’s enemies and allows people to feel protective of him. In the United States on January 6, 2021, we saw what happens when followers feel their strongman leader is in distress. Among other things, the January 6 spectacle was a leader rescue operation. The message Trump conveyed to his followers was: My election has been stolen. I’m out in the cold. You have to fight, or you won’t have a country anymore. Then at one point he warned they might never see him again. That’s very important. If a strongman’s followers are bonded to him, they become existentially upset at the notion that he will disappear, and they will do anything to prevent that.

As 100 percent transactional, amoral individuals, strongmen will say one thing to one group and the opposite to another group to gain power. And so they have these weird constituencies of people, say housewives and gangsters, religious devotees and crooks, who don’t have much in common except their leader. Trump, for example, is held up as the protector of the Jews, but he is supported by and supportive of neo-Nazis. That’s how strongmen roll, and that’s why they’re so dangerous.

One condition that primes societies for strongmen comes about when there’s a huge amount of societal change, or too much progress being made for some people’s tastes. It could be progress on workers’ rights, racial emancipation or gender equity. In 1930s Spain, for example, women gained property, education and voting rights. And then Franco came in, and there was an extreme backlash. That has happened over and over again, whether the strongman comes into power through elections or a coup.

There’s also something I call autocratic backfire, where strongmen start to believe their own propaganda and surround themselves with family members and sycophants. Over time, they stop listening to experts. They get grandiose and then they make mistakes and bad decisions. If a strongman’s moves backfire and things get too disastrous, the population will call for his ouster. Mass nonviolent protest is really important all over the world to create a counter-optics to the strongman following. Protest is most effective when you get the so-called pillars of society to join, i.e., the financial elites and the business community who bought into the strongman and then realize his rule isn’t going that well. If even some of them join in protest, you have the traction to deflate the personality cult and get rid of the strongman.

Josh Rogin is a foreign policy columnist for the Global Opinions section of The Washington Post and a political analyst for CNN. He is the author of the book Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century.

After the end of the Cold War, liberal internationalists declared the “end of history” and assumed that liberal values such as the preference for democracy, freedom, human rights, the rule of law and free markets would inevitably continue to spread. The model of dictatorship led by the strongman was considered defeated and even obsolete. But this was not correct. The autocracies evolved. The strongmen fought back.

The resurgence of the strongman fed upon several unfortunate trends. Built into the assumptions at the end of the Cold War was the idea that liberal institutions would provide checks and balances on the abuse of power by individuals who sought to undermine the public good for their own interest. But many of these institutions became ineffective over time. The economic benefits of the rapid globalization of the 1990s were not distributed fairly, creating disparities in free societies that fed grievances against liberal institutions.

What makes a strongman is the willingness to take advantage of the weaknesses in institutions to accumulate power, money, military might, territory and the ability to control and thereby subjugate others. Their appeal is contained in their offer to the masses: If you give up your rights, your agency, your personal sovereignty, you will be rewarded with security and even prosperity. For most of human history, this offer has been a false one. The promise of plenty was never fulfilled. The security offered up by dictatorships was always fleeting. The strongmen never delivered the promised prosperity after they stole the people’s money and their say over their own governance.

The current leadership in China is making a plausible attempt as a team of strongmen to succeed in delivering on this Faustian bargain. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has built what will soon be the world’s largest economy, lifting hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty. Their methods are evil and criminal. They include the genocide of Uyghur Muslims, the cultural erasure of Tibet, the brutal crackdown on civil society, the imprisonment of all dissidents and activists and a system of social control that subjects all Chinese citizens to a life lived in constant fear of a security apparatus that is accountable to no one.

The reason the CCP can even attempt such a feat is due to its international enablers, mostly those in the free and open societies it seeks to undermine. Chinese companies are fueled by enormous amounts of capital given freely by Wall Street, taken from U.S. investors. The Chinese military and its associated industry are building on Western technology, some stolen and some acquired with American capital. Meanwhile, the CCP has developed a worldwide network of organizations that aids its mission—called the United Front—which it uses to interfere in free and open societies and neuter any opposition to its plans.

Historically, strongmen fail when the internal contradictions in their systems become too difficult to manage. Often this is because their ambitions outpace their resources, causing them to renege on their promises of prosperity and resort to brutal tactics to maintain power. This is a big part of why the Soviet Union collapsed. The CCP is doing everything it can to avoid repeating the Soviet Union’s mistakes. But it can only succeed if the free and open societies continue to support and fund the CCP’s strategy.

Gideon Rachman is the chief foreign affairs commentator at the Financial Times. His latest book is The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World.

One of the disturbing things about the strongman phenomenon is how it spans both democracies and autocracies. I would say that the leaders of many of the world’s most powerful countries are now, broadly speaking, in the strongman category, including Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir Putin in Russia. Their countries constitute two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and a third, the United States, is in danger of reelecting Donald Trump, who I think fits the mold. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan is an important figure, as is Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. I would argue that Benjamin Netanyahu was getting pretty close to a strongman style of leadership, but the war may have thrown everything up in the air.

These are all leaders who form a cult of personality and who, in different ways, communicate to their followers not to trust in the system or institutions or even a set ideology—that they alone can fix things. They are almost invariably nationalists, all trying to make their country great again. A third characteristic is that they lure people by amplifying or creating a sense of crisis. Because if you’re not in a crisis, why would you need to make trade-offs such as trashing the rule of law or closing down the free press or locking up political opponents?

Given differing social and historical conditions, the crises will vary. Trump talks about the border, about crime, about how “people are laughing at us” around the world. In 2012, Xi used tackling corruption to justify purging the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and he also pushed the idea that the West was trying to overthrow the Chinese system or block China’s rise, which is still part of the rhetoric. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines justified shooting people in the streets by whipping up fears of high crime. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, the 43-year-old former nightclub manager who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” was recently reelected and is very popular for taking a real problem, gang violence, and saying, okay, I’m going to suspend normal operations and just have these huge prisons and throw people into them.

A big dividing line exists between countries that still have a free press and independent courts and those that don’t. In China, there’s total control of the narrative by the CCP. Russia is heading that way. Duterte was unable to change the constitution of his country to allow him to run for another term. So, if you’ve still got some checks and balances, you’ve got a fighting chance to thwart a strongman. Obviously, the United States falls into that category.

The current age of the strongman is also the age of the rise of social media, because social media undermines the idea of a single truth that is vetted by professionals that have standards.

Twentieth-century political philosopher Hannah Arendt felt that the ideal acolytes for totalitarian leaders were those who could no longer distinguish between truth and fiction. Through social media, you can create your own narratives and then pump it out to your followers. And if you decide you don’t trust experts and you do your own research, you end up validating your prejudices, and you also go for the most emotionally appealing narratives. That’s why things go viral, because they get people in the guts—they appeal to your heart, or they make you angry or make you laugh, but that’s not a useful way of thinking about complex international or domestic issues.

Cynthia Arnson is a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Citizens increasingly are tolerating populist authoritarianism when they feel alienated from the traditional political system and when they believe that basic needs are not being met. The citizen’s commitment to abstract norms of liberal democracy—the idea of checks and balances, the separation of powers—becomes much less important than the satisfaction of daily needs, such as security, a sustainable livelihood and access to quality services such as education. In democratic contexts, strongmen can emerge because voters want anyone but the current government. In Spanish the expression is “voto de castigo”—the punishment vote; essentially, “Throw the bums out.”

Photo credit: www.kremlin.ru / governo.it (CC BY 3.0 IT) / Palácio do Planalto (CC BY 2.0)

In Latin America, the democratic transitions that took place in the late 1980s and 1990s brought a period of optimism about the possibilities for democracy. Starting around 2000, Latin American countries experienced an enormous commodity boom due to the huge increase in Chinese demand for raw materials (iron ore, copper and soy) and oil from countries such as Venezuela. The boom coincided with a period of leftist governance, including that of Venezuela’s populist, quasi-authoritarian Hugo Chávez and social-democratic leftists Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) of Brazil. Using the income from commodities, government after government adopted social policies that lifted millions of people out of poverty.

With the 2008-2009 financial crisis in the developed world, the boom started to erode. Frustration grew as people fell back into poverty. In 2019, Chile, which had been seen as the poster child of stable governance, consensus-based politics and sound macroeconomic management, saw the largest demonstrations since the return of democracy, literally millions of people taking to the streets to protest. There were similar demonstrations in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and elsewhere. At the same time, several mega-corruption scandals came to light, as well as scandals involving presidents and other politicians. Citizens lost faith in democracy’s ability to deliver and to protect them from violence, including gang extortion and threats.

The COVID pandemic only made things worse in terms of rising poverty, inequality and crime.

With young people not in school and unemployment levels through the roof, criminal groups had many opportunities to recruit. Add to this corruption in many countries in the police and judiciary, and a tendency toward militarizing domestic security, that is, putting it in the hands of the armed forces. In addition, drug trafficking—most notoriously cocaine from Colombia and Peru and meth, opioids and marijuana from Mexico—expanded throughout Latin America, as did domestic drug consumption. Organized cartels grew and diversified into migrant trafficking and illegal mining. The violence related to it all surged.

Fighting criminal violence is why President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has become immensely popular. Is he an example of a “good strongman,” as some claim? While I have sympathy for the plight of average Salvadorans whose lives have been a misery because of gang violence, it’s hard to embrace the wholly undemocratic methods his government has employed. The number of innocent people who have been dragooned into prison without any recourse or access to legal due process is staggering. Bukele is also gutting the judiciary, putting his allies into key positions and vilifying and spying on his critics and opposition politicians. Limiting the military’s involvement in domestic politics was a key feature of the 1992 peace agreement that ended decades of guerrilla warfare. Under Bukele that’s been completely upended. A majority of his people think that strongman rule is fine as long as it deals with the criminal gangs. The problem is that once the checks on power are removed, it’s extremely difficult to put them back into place.

Case in point: In July, Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly to oust the incumbent authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro. Yet Maduro has been intent on maintaining power through massive fraud and repression and (so far) has the support of the armed forces. Other dictatorships—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—support Maduro, but he is isolated regionally and in the West.

Judy Klitsner is a senior educator at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and the author of Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other. She is the founding board chair of Sacred Spaces, an organization that seeks to address abuses of power in Jewish institutions.

The approach to power in Tanach is complicated. God is all-powerful, which sets a tone that there is such a thing as hierarchy—and that it is a good thing.

In terms of people, the Torah communicates its disapproval of giving anyone absolute power; numerous stories serve as cautionary tales of what happens when power is not accompanied by oversight. Who are the power figures in Tanach? We’ve got kohanim (priests), kings and prophets. And for each group the biblical text shows the problematic nature of power; the limits of their power are built into the stories. The kohen, while elected not on merit, but through dynasty, is for the most part a positive figure. When priests do their job well, they bring people closer to God.

But they can also abuse their power, as when the sons of Eli the Kohen use their power to sexually abuse women. Such stories sound a warning: Never confuse God’s messengers with God, and never invest absolute authority in any human leader, no matter how holy or authoritative the aura that surrounds them.

The king is the leader I find most fascinating. God warns about kings even before they appear: In the book of Deuteronomy, a hypothetical king is commanded to read from the Torah on a regular basis, so that his head will not swell and so that he will never forget that God is above him. The king must not have too many wives, money or horses. Those might not be the specific things that we have to look out for today, but we still need to be wary of a leader who is bound to blur the line between himself and the ultimate authority of God.

Through its cautionary tales, the Bible warns us against viewing the abuse of power as a bitter pill we must swallow if we are to have great leaders.

A special warning comes in the stories of kings who have charisma, particularly the story of David. David oozes charisma, to the point that everyone around him, even his great rival Saul, falls in love with him (significantly, the text never attests to David loving anyone in return). In time, David’s success leads to the “swollen head” warned of in Deuteronomy, and to his breaking the bounds of morality and God’s law. Through his story, and through many others, the Tanach issues its warning: Look what happens when the public, through its adulation, gives leaders supreme, unchecked authority.

The prophet, who is chosen by God, often serves to speak truth to power, disempowering the strongman. Often, God chooses as prophets people who lack confidence in their own power, maybe to make clear that they, like all human leaders, are no more than vessels of God. A prime example is Moses, a man with speech problems who, according to some commentators, was chosen specifically so that no one would confuse the messenger with God, the sender.

In addition to the familiar categories of king, priest and prophet, there is an unexpected sprinkling of women in Tanach who speak truth to power. Perhaps the most compelling are the two midwives of Exodus, who refuse Pharaoh’s direct order to kill all male Jewish babies. In their defiance of the all-powerful king, they have no power in the way that we generally understand it. They come armed with only their “fear of God.” There’s something so powerful about the notion that when you fear God, the ultimate authority, you don’t fear any human intermediary: You have the power of conscience, of transcendence. In response to their act of defiance, Pharaoh is forced to change tactics—and the reader understands that the midwives won that round. So here’s a strongman type who by all normal measures of power has everything, yet he is defeated by two women who, by all normal measures of power, have nothing.

In the biblical mindset, power matters. As God’s subjects, we need to accept God’s ultimate power and to feel a sense of both transcendence and humility in our lives. Perhaps as part of this, we need to have respect for human leaders, who are invested with some degree of authority and power. But at the same time, the Torah warns us of our responsibility to place limits on human power. Unchecked power will lead to corruption and abuse, which run counter to God’s wishes for an ethical world.

I’m the founding board chair of an organization called Sacred Spaces, which seeks to prevent abuses of power in the Jewish world. In my work, I have observed the continuing thirst for—and dangers of­­—all-powerful, charismatic leadership. Some time ago, when I spoke with one rabbi about the need to call to task a religious leader who was abusing his power, the rabbi responded: “Yes, I’ve heard the stories, but what are we going to do? Charismatic leadership is so hard to come by.” Through its cautionary tales, the Bible warns us against viewing the abuse of power as a bitter pill we must swallow if we are to have great leaders. I sometimes wonder what it is about human nature that makes us hunger for this kind of leadership. Maybe, as the world increasingly spins out of control, these leaders, who exude power and confidence, give us a feeling that we are being taken care of. I suppose there is something very natural about this—yet at the same time, as the Torah warns, this mindset poses great dangers.

M. Steven Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His book Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence was published in 2011. His latest is Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge.

I started researching Muslim-majority societies in part because of questions rattling around in the public consciousness, especially in Western countries, about whether Muslims were different from non-Muslims—more prone to political violence, more wedded to the notion of fusing the state and religious authority. Also about whether Muslim societies lagged behind when it came to treatment of women and whether socioeconomic inequality was higher or lower compared to non-Muslim societies.

What I found in my research was that the stereotypes really had little basis. For example, I didn’t find much support for the notion that Muslims want theocracy. Many want their leaders to be pious, just as many people do in predominantly Christian countries and as many Hindus do in India. But that doesn’t mean that they necessarily want their political leaders to be religious leaders, or that the piety of the leader is the most important thing.

I did find that the status and the treatment of women in predominantly Muslim societies was somewhat worse than in non-Muslim societies; however I could not locate the causes in the root characteristics of Islam itself. You can certainly find justification in the Quran for the subjugation of women, but you can find just as much in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. But generally speaking, there’s a resemblance between a highly hierarchical or patriarchal society and strongman leadership.

Fundamentalist Christians, for example, tend to buy into a very rigid notion of the faith and a very literalist reading of scripture, so you might expect them to be more likely to accept rigid hierarchy, a strongman leader and blind obeisance to authority. Christian nationalism also elevates Christians as better Americans than non-Christians. While utterly antithetical to Christianity itself, and certainly to the founding principles of the United States, this is a kind of religious ethnonationalism peddled by so-called strongman leaders. India’s Narendra Modi, for example, pushes the story of Hindus as the only true Indians and calls Muslims infiltrators, as if they’re infiltrating India from Pakistan even though they’ve lived in India for centuries.

But is there something about Muslim societies that’s more conducive to strongman politics? Looking around the world you see that there are very few Muslim democracies. There actually were more 10 or 15 years ago. Tunisia, for example, is no longer a democratic regime. Indonesia is still a democracy but a much less full and vigorous one than it was. There are African countries, predominantly Muslim, that went through substantial periods of democracy and are now either autocracies like Mali or semi-democracies like Senegal. Someone like President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt wields power that is based more on naked coercion than genuine charisma. He lacks a popular following, but he has built a neo-pharaonic personality culture himself and is portrayed as a new pharaoh in Egyptian media.

Eric Posner is on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School and is the author of The Demagogue’s Playbook.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution were definitely worried about an authoritarian president. And I think they were really worried about demagogues, who are a bit like strongmen—those who, in a democracy or a democratic republic, attain power by selling division and making promises they can’t keep. Basically, a strongman fools the public into supporting him, and then once he has power he doesn’t give it up.

The framers were thinking about that type of person because they were well versed in ancient Greek and Roman history, from which they drew many examples of demagogues or strongmen. So in an effort to prevent that from happening, they created a system of checks and balances, whereby policy would be made not by the president but by Congress. The president would have some independent policymaking power and would be able to exercise the veto, but they thought of Congress as the primary source of authority, with the courts acting as another check on arbitrary power. They also thought it was important to have a federal system where states could exercise power and prevent a national demagogue from centralizing it. There’s a lot of this tension in the way they drafted the Constitution, as they tried to make a national government that was strong but not too strong, and a presidency that would be led by a strong leader but not too strong a leader.

That’s not to say there haven’t been U.S. presidents with strongman characteristics. Andrew Jackson was a tough guy, and a lot of voters admired that. He came to power essentially by accusing the electoral system of being corrupt and by relying on his fame as a general who had won some important battles. He didn’t have very concrete ideas for reform or policy proposals, but he was able to harness public excitement based, again, on his military victories and also on growing resentment toward the elites who controlled the national government. Once Jackson was in power, he was quite destructive. He got rid of the Second Bank of the United States, which was a bit like the Federal Reserve now, because he saw it as a threat to his personal political power. He also instituted a new form of civil service that was based much more on patronage than on merit.

Historically, if a lot of people in the country feel that their elected officials are not paying attention to their interests, there’s an opportunity for a strongman-type politician, who’s very ambitious and usually amoral, to obtain power. This person will exaggerate the corruption of the people in the establishment and make promises that are unrealistic in order to attract votes. This type of demagogic strategy is quite risky because it’s very divisive; while you might attain a lot of enthusiastic support from one group of people, you’re going to terrify another. For example, Jackson won the election, but people on the other side were horrified, and they were worried he’d become a dictator.

A strongman can also create risks to his own power. If a strongman leader isn’t subject to some kind of broad political constraint, like legitimate elections, he might lose sight of what the public cares about and implement bad or unpopular policies. Jackson never did lose power, serving out two terms, but his power diminished a bit over time, because a lot of people didn’t like what he did.

David A. Bell is a professor of history at Princeton and the author of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution.

It’s been repeatedly the case in Western and world history that powerful strongmen develop intense and genuine forms of personal popularity which then give them the support to do what they want. Charisma drives authoritarianism in a very basic way, because it generates a powerful imagined bond with a political leader, and that bond can often trump constitutional rules, pun intended.

If you focus on the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions—on Napoleon in France, Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti, and Simon Bolivar in Latin America—nearly all the so-called democratic revolutions of this period existed in tension with this lure of the charismatic strongman. In most of the countries that experienced revolutions, democracy actually failed and a strongman succeeded.

Do countries recover from this? In a lot of cases they do, but it’s tricky. When an authoritarian rises to power and then leads a country into disaster—as happened with Napoleon and with Bolivar—there’s a tendency to go back to a representative democracy and try again. But the initial glow around these people remains a potent factor in the politics of the country for a long time. France is the prime example—after Napoleon fell, people were relieved that the European wars were over, but many of them felt the country had become pale and unexciting, and they longed for the days of triumph and glory, so you have repeated efforts to bring back the monarchy. For his part, Bolivar reasoned that if a country was impossible to manage, it needed a substitute monarch, someone who could appeal and rule not just by consent but by “acclamation”—a word he used a great deal.

The constant desire is for a charismatic leader who can break through logjams without being a dictator. The temptation is always there, if you have that acclamatory support, to use it.

The early American example is an exception, but not entirely. Having a leader like George Washington was a terrible temptation for the country. Washington commanded such respect and adoration, he was probably the reason the Constitution was ratified in the first place—people trusted him. But no one who came after was like him, so you see these repeated efforts later to make the presidency into something it wasn’t designed for. The theorist Max Weber talks about the routinization of charisma—how the charisma that starts with an individual becomes attached to an office. So the way the U.S. presidency is seen as an incredibly powerful and charismatic office dates back to that stamp first put on it by Washington. The trouble with that is the tendency to put one’s faith in the man rather than in a system or a party or a set of ideas or rules.

It’s notable that many people were genuinely terrified Washington would become a dictator. John Adams was constantly warning about this. He said, look, you guys are creating an idol to worship, and you’ve got to stop. He even wrote to someone saying thank God someone else other than Washington won the battle of Saratoga, because otherwise nobody could have stopped him. Of course, Adams was always jealous of Washington—said he looked good on horseback but called him something of a dummy, a “character of convention” people worshiped simply because they needed an idol to worship. However, there was also a very strong “small-r” republican tradition in early America that Washington and others agreed on. Washington stepped down from the presidency and never became a dictator. In many other countries, the possibility became a reality, and there’s been alternation between periods of democracy and periods of authoritarianism ever since.

What’s interesting about today is how few strongmen and would-be strongmen have party support, as Stalin or Hitler did. Putin doesn’t really have it. Trump wants to make the Republican Party into something more like that, but people don’t have membership cards in his party, and there’s no paramilitary like the SS associated with it—not yet, anyway. Certainly Lenin and Stalin both became demigods in a way that’s evocative of some of these current strongmen, but this century is more like the 19th than the 20th, with so-called “Caesarists” who rise in democracies as individuals.

Paul Goldberg was born in Moscow and is president of the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union. His most recent novel, The Dissident, is set in Moscow during the Brezhnev era.

One of the characteristics of a strongman is his swagger—not training, not the knowledge of military craft, or what have you. It’s the impression of strength, it’s acting the part. It’s also a promise to his followers: We’ll take care of whatever the problems are the old-fashioned way, through violence, where everybody else has failed, where all those bleeding hearts have failed. It’s walking like Rambo while actually being a wimpy little twerp like Hitler.

So to some extent, the lure of the strongman lies in the creation of this giant who is actually not so gigantic. Joseph Stalin is your classic strongman. He was very short and had muscular-skeletal problems, but the mustache made him big. He made people think he was protecting and defending them. Meanwhile, he was coming up with these crazy ideas. And what was really interesting is when he died in 1953, people cried, including people who were in prison camps at the time. Why were they crying? Because they had lost the strongman, and the figures who were coming in his wake were unimpressive bureaucrats. After Stalin, the Soviet justice system tried to act as an intimidation-based system. A system itself can act as a strongman, but somewhere along the way, there has to be a strongman leader.

My Soviet experience was different from the experience of my parents. During their childhoods, for example, under Comrade Stalin, children would be taught songs about not knowing Stalin but loving him anyway. There were ABC books where you could color in pictures of Stalin. For me the system of intimidation was the system of schooling, of getting you to accept the swagger not of an individual but of a system. But it was a swagger of a system that was built originally on an individual.

There were other Soviet strongmen. Certainly Vladimir Lenin, but the thing about Grandfather Lenin is that it was really a fairy tale. That’s what the system is about, you have to have a mythology, you have to have a creation myth. So Lenin is part of it. There have been many anthropological studies and theological works on this phenomenon, which happens in all countries, whereby you create the religion, the myth. Myths form around all kinds of leaders, not just despots. Like George Washington coming clean about chopping down the cherry tree.

What’s ironic about so many strongmen is that they have no military training and no military experience. Hitler was famously inept when it came to military matters, which is why some of the military commanders of Germany tried to get rid of him. As far as I know, nobody tried to kill Stalin during World War II, but there were stories of ill-prepared attacks on the Germans that were done in honor of Stalin’s birthday. So you have thousands dead just in honor of the strongman’s birthday? Give me a break.

Agnieszka Graff is a Polish-Jewish feminist scholar at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center and coauthor, with Elżbieta Korolczuk, of Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment.

People who think of themselves as defenders of democracy have a huge investment in asking why the naive masses are so easily duped by authoritarian strongmen. I actually don’t like the term strongman, because one of the fascinating aspects of the current wave of authoritarianism is that it’s not necessarily men coming into this power. Of course, I’m thinking of Marine Le Pen in France and Giorgia Meloni in Italy.

Le Pen’s commitment to democracy and the European Union is window dressing. She has managed to normalize her party and cut off the fascist roots of her father because she knows how to play the political game. But there’s no question she’s far right. Meloni comes off as a tough-girl type who will fight for herself and for motherhood, and she will not put up with sexism. She’s like those in the United States in the ultra-conservative moms’ movement and the women in the NRA wielding pink guns to defend themselves and their children against wokeism.

It takes a good story to recruit people who are normally not involved in politics. A populist leader will weave one to stoke public anxiety and fear, name an enemy who is both nebulous and easy to despise, and then announce themself as the savior. Strongman leaders such as Meloni have done this with the moral panic over gender. Here the leader doesn’t have to be a man but has to promise to restore the gender order of yesteryear. It’s about nostalgia, about getting things back to “normal.”

The anti-gender movement, which uses gender interchangeably with “gender ideology,” is an international phenomenon. Its history reaches back to the mid-1990s, when the Vatican got worried about gender being mainstreamed into various human rights treaties, and even farther back to the 1980s, when Russian sociologists joined with American evangelicals to start the World Congress of Families to promote gender conservatism.

Photo credit: World Economic Forum/Manuel Lopez (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) / European people’s party (C BY 2.0) / Wikimedia Commons.

Essentially, this movement is a collection of ideas that have to do with a perceived demographic crisis and with the perceived danger of homosexuality to children. Our women aren’t having children and therefore we will be replaced—that’s one idea. Another is: Our children are in danger from the perverts, who are also emasculating our men who won’t be able to defend us, and therefore we will be replaced. In other words, a society that is decadent, degenerate and unable to reproduce itself is helpless against those hordes from the East or the South that are coming to take over. It’s an ethnonationalism with a very strong gendered component. And women are really good at making it sound maternal.

People who vote for strongman leaders such as Trump, Meloni and Orbán feel they have been humiliated and looked down upon, and that now is their moment of revenge. It’s about wounded dignity. One image that keeps coming up in the speeches of these various leaders is that now is the time to rise from one’s knees. No more apologizing or being ashamed for, say, telling sexist jokes, or for being antisemitic. One of the reasons Jarosław Kaczynski (head of Poland’s authoritarian-populist Law and Justice party, which lost its parliamentary majority in 2023) is so popular is that he has repeatedly promised Polish people that they would never have to apologize for antisemitism. Which is not the same as telling them it’s okay to be an antisemite. It’s telling them: The people who accuse you of antisemitism are wrong, and we will shame them.

Strongmen likewise speak to the people who say racist things but don’t think of themselves as racist. They speak to the stay-at-home moms who are sick of being told that they should have a career. It’s the anger of ordinary people who have had it with the liberal elites. I’m not saying that racism is okay. What I’m saying is that the accusation of racism is often a mark of class distinction. And the same goes for sexism. In Eastern Europe, what liberals call sexism is very often just the behavior of working-class people, including women.

If you ask me: “What do right-wing populists think about gender?” I would tell you, not much. And that’s really the strangeness or the irony of right-wing populism and so-called strongman leaders—that these are not people with strong views on anything. The big question is whether they have taken it too far in their coalition with the religious right. Because once you get women really angry about taking away reproductive freedom, you risk losing power.

Drew Westen is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University and the author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

People will say that psychopaths have very low emotional intelligence—and on one level that’s true, they don’t feel for others at all—but psychopaths are capable of conning people in a way that requires a very specific emotional intelligence. It’s a gut-level ability to see people’s vulnerabilities and exploit them. Strongmen always do this.

Hervey M. Cleckley, who developed the concept of psychopathic personality disorder back in the 1940s, used the term “superficial charm,” which many characterize as a kind of “animal charm.” Thinking of Hitler at his rallies, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could see anything but a paranoid, hateful man, but to the German people he had an animal charm that drew them in. A strongman with a psychopathic personality gets people to feel and share in his grandeur. He gets the narcissistic gratification that all these people are following him, and they in turn get the gratification of feeling part of this person who’s godlike, which renews their self-esteem.

The confluence of psychopathic, narcissistic and paranoid personality disorders is what is called malignant narcissism. Talk about a toxic mix. A malignant narcissistic strongman can channel the feelings of people who feel disenfranchised in some way and simultaneously appeal to people’s desire for hierarchy, for someone who will give them commands. So, it’s partly the message “I am you; when they go after me, they’re going after you” and partly “I can fix it.” I stress the psychopathic part because it’s that type of emotional intelligence that allows a strongman to convince people. Obviously, there has to exist a vulnerability on the part of the population as well.

Theodor Adorno and his colleagues at UC Berkeley published The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. At the time people thought a vulnerability to authoritarianism was unique to the German character, but in their study they also saw it in about 35-40 percent of Americans. Among other things, that vulnerability was related to harsh discipline in childhood, and both hate and admiration for a father who doled it out.

Former president Trump attempts to draw on the combination of people feeling that their standard of living is declining because they can’t count on the job they used to have, their skills are no longer valued and no one has trained them for a new job, together with the belief that another group of “un-American” people are entering the country, getting all kinds of things and taking resources in a zero-sum game. With his deep psychological sense of grievance, he appeals to their own grievances. I see your pain, Trump conveys, and he convinces them that he means it. What many of them, white Americans in particular, are seeing is that home is changing. And whether you’re racist or not, that registers; many don’t want their culture to change or fear ways it may change with an influx of people from different cultures. When immigrants are vilified and people hear “they’re poisoning the blood of America,” that’s when you get a real vulnerability to a strongman who promises to return the motherland to what it was.

Alessandro Nai is a political scientist and associate professor of political communication at the University of Amsterdam. He is the coauthor of Dark Politics: The Personality of Politicians and the Future of Democracy.

Often, strongmen take from the populist playbook and use an “us versus them” rhetoric. They present themselves as part of a select in-group of people who ought to be cherished and protected, in particular against political attacks from the out-group. Boundaries defining these in- and out-groups can be political, ethnic, ideological or economic. For instance, left-wing strongmen will say, “We have to take the power back from the economic elites who have been crushing us,” whereas strongmen from the right tend to emphasize ethnic or cultural intergroup differences. Within this vision of the world, everything can be summarized as a struggle between us and them, who’s in and who’s out.

The best scenario for a strongman is having a small, powerful in-group with clearly defined boundaries. The more you expand the boundaries, which means making the group more inclusive, the harder the task of embodying all people within it. In this sense, Donald Trump embodies the MAGA base, his in-group. Remember, the strong leader is there to lift up the good people of the in-group, so everything that happens to Trump—e.g., his court cases, and the assassination attempt—can be framed as a potential attack from the out-group.

Social identity theory, developed in the 1960s and 1970s by social psychologists, shows that the identification of individuals into groups is immediate, simple and therefore powerful. In one experiment, they put a bunch of people in a room and randomly distributed sheets of paper, some blue, some green. Then they told everyone to interact with the people who had the same color paper as they did. They found that people developed an attachment toward their assigned color and even liked the other color a little bit less. It’s nothing, just a random piece of paper, right? But your brain picks it as an excuse for creating a new identity, a reason to belong. We all experience a strong need to belong, to have a place in the world. And if you’re part of a closed, self-referential system like MAGA, with a uniformity of opinions and a leader who continuously feeds into and reinforces them, the appeal of the in-group becomes a strong part of your identity. In such a set of circumstances, realizing that you’re part of a closed system is quite hard.

Beyond the tension of in- and out-groups, an additional framework for understanding why politics is today so confrontational is the concept of “need for chaos,” which is taking the academic literature by storm. Quite simply, there is a not-negligible part of the population that would like to see the world burn. They seek disorder, they seek confusion. These people are not crazy or insane in any clinical way; they simply hold strong attitudes towards destruction—also as a means toward reconstruction. From a rational standpoint, they see that there are problems we cannot solve. So, they say, let’s burn everything to the ground and build it up again. It is not a mystery that such a type of voter is drawn toward politicians who want to shake the tree of normal politics or break norms. It’s appealing because they create confusion, and confusion is potentially interesting. Confusion can be the solution. In this sense, appealing to this “need for chaos” could be a useful tool for the strongman who needs power.

Agata Mirowska is an assistant professor at NEOMA Business School in Mont-Saint-Aignan, France. She is the lead author of “The Allure of Tyrannical Leaders: Moral Foundations, Belief in a Dangerous World, and Follower Gender,” published in the Journal of Business Ethics.

Leaders require people who are willing to follow them, and so we must ask: What are the characteristics of the tyrannical strongman, and when someone is displaying those characteristics, why are there people who are willing to follow?

When someone is presented to us in a leadership role, e.g. a new boss, teacher or political candidate, we compare that person to our ideal prototype of a leader. The better they fit that prototype, the more likely we are to be willing to follow that person. These prototypes arise from our upbringing, our experiences and our cultural, religious and educational backgrounds. So, people from certain cultures may have different perceptions of what a leader is like based on past leaders or what is passed down from their parents and what they see in their home.

The idea is that prototypes are based on instinctive reactions. So, if you encounter someone who’s really loud, your reaction may be, I want that person as a leader because they’re going to speak up for me and speak truth to power. A leader may show themselves to be selfish or manipulative but give the message that they are willing to be selfish in service to the group, i.e., “I’m loud and pushy, manipulative and horrible, but I’ll do the dirty stuff you don’t want to or can’t do.”

If you look at human societies through the ages, we see that for a long time, there was a very egalitarian approach. Once we developed agriculture some 12,000 years ago and started farming, conserving resources and settling down into groups, we started to have intergroup conflicts, which gave rise to the need for a leader who was going to defend the group and defend its resources.

The tyrannical leader is domineering, pushy, manipulative, conceited, selfish and loud. My research team looked at how people who prize loyalty, authority and maintaining tradition are attracted to these types of leaders, and we found that endorsement of the tyrannical leader was particularly strong for people who perceive a certain level of instability, uncertainty and danger around them.

They may share a sense of wanting to make the world a better place with those who reject the strongman, but they believe the strongman leader is the one who can achieve it.

We’re currently working on designing a study looking at whether the gender of a leader matters. One of the reasons we posit that men are more likely to follow strongmen than women is that they may be feeling emasculated and gravitate to a strongman as someone they can live vicariously through. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to have experienced some form of victimization at the hands of men, so they may be more hesitant to support the strongman leader.

One of the so-called inoculation strategies to thwart the strongman leader is to try to break down the stereotypes that a man has to be tough, strong and the defender, that he has to fix all the problems. If we can break down those stereotypes and expectations, we can take away the power of the strongman leader. We also need to be careful, especially in organizations but also in society generally, not to reward such strongman tactics, but hold up behaviors more consistent with sensitive, dedicated, and caring leaders as examples.