FREE FOR ALL: Ruth Ben-Ghiat on the emotional inner life of American fascism
To beat something, you have to get it
This week, Joe Biden is ramping up his personal outreach to the American public: he poked fun at himself in a TV appearance on “Late Night,” he turned the age question on Trump, and he’s visiting the Texas/Mexico border to make an in-person pitch for the bipartisan border deal. Donald Trump — after tanking said deal — is also headed to Texas, and in the meantime continues to play the victim, claiming to be a “political dissident” in a CPAC speech and attempting to commiserate with Black Americans over his legal woes even as he consolidates his power over the Republican Party. To make sense of the roles the presidential contenders are playing — and to understand what Americans are looking for from their leaders, and in themselves — we look back to our conversation from earlier this year with scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat on the emotional battleground of American politics.
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Often it seems the left in this country takes things that should be inviting and joyous, and after processing them politically, makes them less fun, less joyous. And the right takes things that would be utterly dystopian for many, many people, and is able to build a fun, inviting, joyous movement. That inversion I find very puzzling. Can you talk about that?
Autocrats like Trump are able to use emotions. Now they're negative emotions, right? Grievance, fear, vengeance. But they're very good movement builders. And Trump is a movement builder. You’ve said this, too. (Clip below.) That’s really important.
Autocrats create these communities of belonging, these tribes. And in Trump's case, he even gave them apparel, he gave them slogans. This is what the fascists did. This is what Meloni's doing, the neo-fascist prime minister in Italy.
Liberal democrats have been afraid, in some ways, of passionate politics. And they also have a visual identity crisis. They don't have snappy slogans, they don't have snappy symbols and avatars, and visual icons. They need an update to excite people.
I don't know if it's just an update. It seems to me, many on the left, in America at least, really are not interested in the things you just mentioned, or even look down on them. Can you talk about why there is this contempt for what seems quite obviously useful in politics?
Yes, exactly. It's like they don't see that as the proper content of politics. They see policy as the proper content of politics. And, also, it's easy to turn your nose up at these other models of politics if you've lived in a democracy, because those who do it successfully are often anti-democratic. You see the cheering crowds, you see the adulation, you see the star quality.
What do we need to do? Some stuff, like the two-party system, is pretty tough to change in the short term. But hats — we could make hats right now. We could get someone to make a song right now.
Here's a big thing. We need optimism. We need hope. And we have been profoundly conditioned against this in part by a very well-thought-out right-wing strategy. The economy is booming; it's really good. People feel it's bad. People are pessimistic about their lives. There's not that much reason to be pessimistic about your life in some ways. But we've had a loss of optimism, a loss of hope. This is also post-pandemic. There's been a lot of trauma, gun violence. It can be difficult to be optimistic about America.
And so any kind of slogan that could translate into symbols that would unify people has to restore a sense of hope and purpose — and future. That there is a future.
The problem is we don't have very long to do this. We've left this until quite late.
A lot of the political discourse that I'm participating in and reading feels like it’s missing the emotional substrate. We talk about CRT, but there's really something deeper going on about parents dreading the loss of control over their children. Can you talk about emotions in the context of rising authoritarianism?
Autocrats are very, very good at tapping into people's innermost fears. On the one hand, they make themselves the carriers of those fears, but they also make themselves the solution. So when Trump said, The American dream is dead, he made himself the vessel of the forgotten, the people who felt downtrodden. Of course, his regard for them is fake. He just wants to use them. But he simulated care and inhabited those emotions, and then provided a solution: “I alone can fix it.” And people felt safe with him.
The part that can't really have a democratic analog is the victimhood, the persecution complex. It's not just Trump who does this. It's Mussolini, Putin to some extent, Berlusconi, Erdogan. This victimhood is really important because it elicits a protectiveness. So you go to Trump rallies, and people will say, “He's been through so much, we've got to be there to support him.” Even to the point of being an army that sacks the Capitol.
That's just out of the realm of possibility for Democratic politicians, who are not whining and saying they're persecuted; they aren’t trying to get people to feel protective of them. It's like two incommensurate worlds.
So how can Democratic politicians use emotions? One obvious area is that we have two existential crises in America. One is the climate crisis; the other is guns. Think of when Brandon Wolf — who’d survived the Pulse nightclub shooting, targeting gays — said, “We just want to live. Is that too much to ask?” We want to live. Pro-life. There's a great potential for humanistic discourse there. But very few politicians have taken that opportunity.
It's the standard fare of, “We're going to cap insulin costs. We're going to make child care more affordable.” Meaningful stuff that makes lives better. But I look at the room, and I see people who don't know who they're going to be on the far side of an age of profound social change. And while, technically, yes, the insulin thing is an issue for them, there's something deeper that only the autocratic side knows how to speak to. Is that right?
There's a reason that these people appeal at times of great change, where we had eight years of Obama and people didn't like that. They didn't want to have the changes that come with a Black president. We admitted women to combat. We legalized same-sex marriage. They don't like that. So Trump is the “revolution of reaction,” as Mussolini defined fascism.
Ironically, though, Biden is the most emotional president we've had in a while. Obama was not outwardly emotional. He was elegantly aloof, in a way. It's been Biden who talks about emotions, about loss and grief. It's often been Biden placing himself as the kind of shepherd of the American people. And yet it's not being received in that same light.
This reminds me of something that I heard from the veteran activist Loretta Ross. She said, You have to take the fears of your opponents seriously. It doesn't mean their fears are correct. Can you talk about that notion of taking the fears of your opposition seriously? And of separating leaders and followers in your moral calculus?
The reason we have to take their fears and their hatreds and all their emotions seriously is that talking about what autocrats can deliver is only half the problem. The other problem is that democracy is failing people. People can feel that it's failing them. And that’s the other time that autocrats have an appeal, aside from when there's lots of change: when democracy, or politics as usual, doesn't seem to be providing the answer.
So we have to take their emotions seriously because that is reality. If we neglect that, we're not serving people. The fallout from neoliberalism, the loneliness crisis. It was Trump who put his finger on that, by talking about the forgotten people. Not Democrats.
For the full interview, click below:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s most recent book is Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present
