What we get instead is an endless series of historical anecdotes about a heterogeneous collection of bad leaders ranging from democratically elected nationalists like Modi to genocidal fanatics like Hitler. What sense does it make to put Silvio Berlusconi in the same category as Muammar Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein? Berlusconi may have been sleazy, manipulative and corrupt, but he didn’t murder political opponents or support terrorism abroad, and he stepped down after losing an election. Ben-Ghiat notes that many strongmen came to power in the 1960s and ’70s through military coups, but that today they are much more likely to be elected. Wouldn’t it be nice to know why coups have largely vanished?
Ben-Ghiat’s case selection seems quite arbitrary: For example, strongmen of the left like Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez or Ecuador’s Rafael Correa are not included, nor are women like Indira Gandhi. If we are focusing on populists in democratic countries, why include autocrats who never faced an election? An analytical framework would allow us to understand how strongmen differ from one another, rather than lumping them into a single amorphous category.
This is too bad, because Trump really does deserve more careful comparison with other leaders. There are indeed certain parallels between him and contemporary populists like Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, insofar as they all rely on a similar rural social base for their support.
