FREE FOR ALL: The Musk-Trump endgame

Historian of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat on what it will take to defeat authoritarianism, the rise of American oligarchs, and how to rebuild a politics based on values

When we last spoke with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, she made a point that’s stuck with us all year: the fight against fascism has been and will be fought on the battleground of emotion. That has informed the way we’ve talked and thought all year about Democratic messaging and the threat of Trump and the MAGA movement, so as we’ve been exploring the ways Kamala Harris’s electoral loss has challenged the ways we and many of the smartest, most thoughtful thinkers we know to revisit their priors and presuppositions about American politics, we got back in touch.

In this conversation, Ben-Ghiat reflected on the election and talked to us about why both Democratic messaging about Trump’s fascist threat and the late tack to the center fell short, how Republican domination of media paid off both in demobilizing potential Democratic voters and mobilizing young men on the right, why the well-worn autocratic playbook still works in advanced democracies, how the threat facing the U.S. fits into the historical context of authoritarianism, and what a reimagined politics of the future might look like.

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Over the past eight years, so many smart commentators and analysts, yourself among them, have made very clear arguments about the threat to democracy of a second Trump administration. But that message was not successful. What happened? Why do you think that message was not heard?

So first of all, as the results of the election come through — because in our system, it takes a very long time to have complete results — this was much closer than people thought. I saw a post saying that it came down to something like 230,000 votes in Wisconsin and two other states. So the first point is that many people did get the message, and half the country got the message.

Though it's the same half that always gets the message. I think the question really is why was it not more compelling? And by that I mean this analysis of the clear and present danger of authoritarianism.

Yeah. So half the country got the message. The other half, part of those people are checked out of any news and they didn't vote at all. And habitually, there are tens of millions of Americans who don't vote. And this election, we also had millions who voted for Biden in 2020 and decided not to vote. So there was a redoubling of this non-participation.

As Eric Liu, the democracy activist, says, "Not voting is voting to let others decide your fate." 

And I guess the fact that that continues to be a factor, even given this threat, that is what bothers me the most. Why do you think that has happened?

Yes. It seems like the real challenge. Right when we had the most consequential election, domestically and internationally of our lifetimes, more Americans chose to opt out. This could indicate that they are fed up with politics altogether, both the constant drumbeat of threats and lies and refutations of the lies you know between the Democrats and Trump.

And also, you know the 21st-century playbook is not just about lying. It's about making the truth too exhausting to search for, that you no longer know what is true and what is not. Politics and voting is based on the possession of facts and truths. So if you no longer believe you can tell what is real, what is true, you may get exasperated and opt out altogether. 

So is that the consequence of the flooding of the zone? And the Elon Musk effect, this transmutation of the social media space that’s taken place since he got involved.

And this has been building this feeling of being exhausted and fed up with politics altogether. So it has been building for a long time. It got much worse you know as Trump was in office and especially when he started with the big lie. And that's by design. Trumpism was the same with Bolsonaro when he was in office in Brazil. It's designed to be a kind of battering ram of threats, lies, outrage, scandals so that you're overwhelmed psychologically and you just demobilize. You just opt out because we think of autocracies, the old-fashioned fascist ones, as regimes that mobilized people because they were going to war. Internal war or external war. But there are many autocracies where the goal is demobilization, making people passive, and making people fed up so they don't resist. Maybe they don't participate fully, but they're not resisting. They are passive. And that's what people want. They don't want a resisting active populace. So that's going on too. People are fed up with politics.

So how do we combat that?

We need a new political product, a new politics that's capable of rousing people out of their dispirited state, and their torpor, and get them excited about politics again. And I think that has to be a politics that's based on values.

Also with charismatic personalities, that may seem to be adopting the autocrats’ playbook, but it's just a fact. And we see that in opposition movements abroad. If you have a charismatic personality to be the symbol of change, that can get people interested. 

So talk about the last four years in a way, because a lot of the stuff that you just went over has to do with stuff that happened under the first Trump administration. We've had this interregnum of the Biden administration that failed to capitalize on that. The charisma question is a big one. It has a lot to do with the infighting over age and the late change of leadership. But they never managed to make that case.

Meanwhile, in the public imagination, you still had the sense that democracy was kind of a failure for a lot of people. There wasn't a lot of faith in the system. Maybe that plugged into people staying home, but was there anything — and I don't want to be too backward-looking. I'd rather look at the future. but just in terms of taking lessons — you have thought of that could explain why they failed to recognize that and build that during the Biden administration? 

I don't know enough about the inner workings of the Biden administration. What I've read is that there was, on one hand, a great commitment to decent values, a great commitment to manufacturing, to bringing back jobs, and to making people's everyday lives better. But it's disappointing and a little frustrating that many Americans either did not fully understand how much the Biden-Harris administration did for the average person or were just under the sway of disinformation.

Fox had to invest huge amounts of propaganda time to combat the Biden administration and say the economy was bad and all about inflation precisely because of the successes of the Biden administration. So that's very frustrating. Had the achievements of the Biden administration been less, Fox wouldn't have needed to mount such an ultimately successful assault.

Not just Fox, though. If you look at the rest of the right-wing information ecosystem, I know was this demobilizing effort that you're talking about, but there was also this effort to mobilize young, disaffected men. We've talked about this in the context of the emotional appeal of fascism before, but also to really speak to other niches in American society that the Republicans correctly identified were dissatisfied: immigrants, and working people of color. And even if those effects are minimal, there was still this effort to make the case not necessarily that Trump was better, but that Biden was bad and that things were failing.

There was a massive delegitimation of presidential authority. And that is also why we got this outcome. Even formally, where the G.O.P. in 2022 said that January 6th was legitimate political discourse. And the Texas G.O.P. literally passed a resolution declaring Biden to be an illegitimate president. 

But let's talk about the charisma question and the masculinity question. What we saw over these four years was a huge mobilization indeed of the whole right-wing universe to recruit young men for the Trump cause, Trump as being the strong man, by harping on the idea of the crisis of masculinity. And casting Biden as an ineffective old senile man. So there was a vacuum of authority in terms of the strong male figure. 

They created this sense based on the realities of Biden's age and on some realities in the economy, that we've talked about in the newsletter quite a bit. This is what we've been calling the failure of change management, the failure to speak to men who can't adjust to a more progressive future.

And the larger theme of the failure of democracy, which is true. All over the world, there's been a sense since – since 2008 and it's been building; This is why autocracies are ascending – that democracy has disappointed people.

This is due to inequality, due to remnants of neoliberalism. The fragility of the social net has created these people who feel lost or who are failing due to drug addiction. We have gun violence; this is an expression of male rage, but it exacerbates the problems.

So I think that in terms of having a charismatic, perhaps younger, although the age as we see with Trump doesn't matter. It's this charismatic, dominant seeming —

I think the “seeming” is very important. 

Seeming, yes, because otherwise, one of the big problems is that in wanting a charismatic male leader, we're replicating the whole problem of the strongman’s appeal. And one of the huge disappointments is that America doesn't seem ready for a female president, as so many other countries have been. But the masculinity question is really marked, because of what my research shows and there's a whole chapter in my book, Strongmen about this: every time you have this rise of authoritarianism, gender politics are one of the main ways this assault becomes expressed.

There's always the crisis of masculinity. Men are losing out. Up comes the strongman. And here we have what Mussolini described, fascism as the “revolution of reaction.” So this is the reaction against women.

So you have the triad of the three pillars of gender politics of authoritarianism and they've worked out here too in America, hypermasculinity, extreme misogyny, and homophobia, which is a reaction against other types of male identities or sexual identities, gender identities.

What’s interesting there is you're seeing this in both the cabinet choices; not just the behavior of Republican representatives; someone like Pete Hegseth is kind of like a central casting caricature of everything you just said in a way, though that’s not to dismiss the threat he would pose in office if he's confirmed.

It's that. He’s a younger man who basically is held up by those three pillars. And there's a reason also that so many of the nominees for cabinet appointments have a cloud of allegations about sexual harassment or abuse or rape. And of course, Trump himself is an adjudicated rapist.

During Trump 1.0, he appointed several people who were facing either allegations, accusations, or legal processes surrounding domestic abuse. This is typical for authoritarianism because one of the main principles of authoritarianism is fewer rights for the many – so you take away large-scale rights, voting rights, you take away reproductive rights – and more liberties for the few, for the oligarchs, for the cronies. And it's a kind of deregulation morally, too. And that's what Trump 1.0 was all about, trying to get people to be their worst selves, to follow the leader. And so the cabinet appointments that we've seen, the nominations so far, many of the people have scandals around them and not just about their private behavior.

And that's also by design. This is holding up as a standard the idea that men should not have any checks placed on their behavior in order to be dominant men. And so I'll remind people that during Trump's first presidency, domestic violence was partly decriminalized. This is very important. The rules were changed so that only physical violence counted as domestic violence: financial, emotional, psychological, all of the other forms of harassment and abuse could no longer be subject to criminal proceedings. And this decriminalization of bad behavior is what we're seeing across the board.

It's the same principle as Trump pardoning so many criminals. All autocrats use pardons because they want criminals to be available for service in the government and the party. So that's a very dispiriting thing, but it's typical of authoritarianism, and it's working. We had a basis for this during Trump 1.0, and now it's coming to some kind of awful apotheosis.

You've written a bit about the Musk/Ramaswamy project. And you just mentioned emotional deregulation, but this is a kind of nightmarish version of the traditional conservative opposition to big government, where now you're going to have these dilettantes outside the government advising the government on institutional deregulation.

This Department of Government Efficiency is what I call the upside-down world of authoritarianism. And it's very typical too that along with a kind of actual political figure, Vivek Ramaswamy, supported by billionaires, you have an actual figure from outside politics, Elon Musk, now making decisions, being part of things.

This is typical cronyism because in autocracies, you have the actual government, and then you have the inner sanctum. And as in Putin's Russia, all over the globe, there are people who are not politicians who have enormous influence, who are cronies. 

The oligarchs. 

So we see that here. But I also want to remind people of the through-line of privatizations and deregulations that from the beginning goes from fascism. Fascist governments had a lot of management of the economy, especially after Mussolini’s and Hitler’s governments became continuous war regimes. However, even Mussolini, who started as a socialist politically, the first thing he did when he came into power as a prime minister of a democracy in 1922 was reassure elites that he was going to be somebody who would back the privatization of major industries.

In 1923, what we call now the telecoms industry, the insurance industry, the electricity industry. They were all privatized. And this is something that's not well known. And then, of course after World War II, you have Chile becoming the laboratory of neoliberalism, with disastrous results. So that's also why I included that in my book.

It doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a continuation of trends. It's a continuation because it's not only a philosophy of small government, it's corruption. Because inevitably, when you really look at what happened in these regimes, how privatizations were carried out, it's cronyism. Pinochet put his sons-in-law in charge of privatizing, and they personally got control of big chemical companies.

So you want to create pipelines for cronies to have capital coming to them personally. And that's what clearly this will be. And putting Elon Musk, who has so many government contracts, in charge of a government entity, whatever it will be, is just like the exacerbation, the apotheosis, or the nadir of this trend. It's a machine to generate profits for cronies. That's what it comes out to be at the expense of the population. And this is just very upsetting thinking about how Musk prophesied mass hardship. This is the richest man in the world, on the back of taxpayer money.

His wealth is based on government contracts, subsidies, carbon credit trading. He is a creature – like the tech industry in general, which created this information space that made his elevation possible – of public money. These incredibly wealthy people have their roots in the military-industrial complex, and this trend toward privatization of key government entities runs back through both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Yes. And to go back to why we are at this moment and the election and going forward. This is a moment when we really need to take stock of the hypocrisies, perhaps, within democratic parties and ideologies. One is on climate.

Trump may be coming in with the slogan “drill, baby drill,” but oil production and extraction were already at a record high under Biden. And we really can't say that authoritarians are the only culprits about climate, even though we have Putin, whose kleptocracy is literally propped up by fossil fuel profits.

Yeah. I don't mean to get into a whataboutism argument on this stuff. But you're right that there is this hypocrisy, and it’s made it difficult for those who've supported Democratic candidates because of their ongoing support for these kinds of policies. 

I mention it to emphasize that one of the mistakes I feel was made by the campaign — and I'm not somebody who's trying to dwell on mistakes — was moving too far to the center.

Now, there was a lot of emphasis placed on making a home for non-MAGA Republicans, people who had left the party, I myself did bipartisan initiatives. I think this is very important, but there wasn't enough focus rhetorically placed on the ideals that appealed to progressives, to young progressives. And there was also the problem of Biden’s foreign policy that seemed hypocritical. So these things just have to be addressed.

Having a politics based on values and putting those values into action and being consistent: values of unity and decency and social justice and justice, racial justice, climate justice, solidarity, human rights, and the rule of law. And some of the foreign policy did not support that, did not seem to support that. And that alienated people.

So this is a chance to have a reevaluation of what it means to be both a small-d democrat and a big-D Democrat and have a new politics based on a set of values that are fundamental to democracy.

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Photo by Sahab Zaribaf/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images; Ruth Ben-Ghiat photo courtesy Beowulf Sheehan