The Strongmen Cometh

Guest Opinion

By Isiah Smith, Jr. | July 8, 2023

The nightmare that haunts my dreams and disturbs my sleep is the prospect that America’s flirtation with authoritarian rule may yet blossom into a full-fledged romance from which we will never divorce ourselves.

Some people think we are obsessed with the man elected President of the United States in 2016. In their minds, we continue to pay far too much attention to that authoritarian figure.

However, to them I say, “Sadly, you are not paying enough attention. He remains a clear and present danger to American democracy and the rule of law. One day he will be gone, but the poisonous politics he unleashed upon our country may well live on.”

Contrary to these assertions, we are not obsessed by the accidental president. The man is unimportant, dispensable, and irrelevant. He, like all of us, will eventually be consigned to the dustbin of history, unable to cause further harm. As the Greek Stoics remind us: memento mori, or remember that you will die.

What doesn’t die so easily is authoritarian philosophy making a mockery of truth and the rule of law. Toni Morrison once wrote that “facts can exist without human intelligence, truth cannot.”

Anyone interested in fully understanding the clear and present danger inherent in the threat the former president poses to our democracy and the rest of the free world should read Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. Ben-Ghiat argues that, as history has shown, strongmen with dictatorial and tyrannical tendencies are as inevitable as the changing of the seasons and the phases of the moon.

Sadly, the United States has proven unusually susceptible to the loathsome lure of strongmen wannabees and authoritarian-leaning politicians.

Unlike diamonds, the former president is not forever. In time he will fade away, but the progeny he has inspired will not, and more are sure to follow in an unending supply of arrogance seeking power.

We are fortunate that the meanspirited man-child governor of Florida appears both too slow afoot and comedically incompetent to create much of a following. His vacant stare and robotic delivery inspire more laughter than fear. It’s profoundly difficult to create and lead a mass following by merely moronically repeating his imbecilic pledge, “We’ll defeat the woke,” whenever he gets near a microphone.

To be a successful authoritarian requires, at minimum, some fragment of an idea. As we have seen, even bad ideas can attract followers. The Florida Man in Tallahassee suffers from a poverty of ideas.

Creeping authoritarianism is nothing to sleep on, nor ignore, not after the disaster of the past seven years. Politics is all about the pursuit of power; thus, anyone who enters politics is thirsting for power. The only thing that will quench their thirst is more power. Those power-seeking “public servants” waiting in the wings are no doubt salivating over the prospect of obtaining boundless authoritarian power. The “former guy” has already given them the road map and shown that it’s easier than they thought.

Ben-Ghiat warns us to beware of would-be leaders who attempt to sell themselves as pure and noble champions of the people and who claim that they are fighting against greedy and corrupt elites who disdain ordinary citizens. They resist all limitations to their powers and launch sustained attacks against established institutions that undergird our democratic institutions and our constitutional norms and laws.

From Mussolini to the present, these strongmen move swiftly to stack the judiciary and the legislative bodies with their hand-picked toadies. Then, to tighten their control, they declare war on the press. (Both Stalin and the former guy declared the press to be the “enemy of the people.”) Drunk on power, they proceed to scrap the laws the founders designed specifically to prevent such abuses of power.

When strongmen make absurdist comments such as, “Only I can fix it,” “I am your retribution,” and “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you—and I’m just standing in the way,” they present themselves as messianic saviors, the people’s champions singularly able to resist the evil and voracious elite and defeat them on behalf of the people. The only surprise is how easily the authoritarian dream can be realized.

The strongman’s most powerful weapon is his war against truth. Because, as Voltaire said (in translation), “...those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Nothing explains Jan. 6 better than those elegant words.

The last thing you need to know about strongmen: They never leave voluntarily and will do anything to hold on to power. Even resorting to violence.

Sound familiar?

“Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Isiah Smith, Jr. is a retired government attorney.