“I'M NOT the one trying to undermine American democracy. I'm the one who's trying to save it,” Donald Trump told the North Carolina Republican convention on June 5th. The former president boasts that he will be reinstated in August. Yet far from being dismissed as delusional, he enjoys solid support from millions of Republican voters, who regard him as the rightful president.
The situation is unique in American history but hardly unusual elsewhere. From the fascist years in Europe to the age of military coups in Africa and Latin America, periods of antidemocratic, strongmen rulers have been a feature of political systems. Now a new wave of such autocrats is cresting, with Hungary and arguably India joining the ranks of Turkey, Belarus and Russia in having governance that revolves around one man. Even in China, Xi Jinping has brought personalistic rule to new heights.
The concept of “personalist rule”—which organises government institutions around the self-preservation of a leader whose private interests prevail over national ones—provides a useful frame to understand the challenge to democracy and how to overcome it. As dire as turns to illiberalism look, strongmen have particular vulnerabilities and society can take specific actions to curb their behaviour.
Although more commonly associated with autocracies, personalist rule can emerge as a force to degrade mature democracies, as happened in America under Mr Trump, Italy under Silvio Berlusconi and the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte. Even if democracy holds and they are forced out of office, they develop their own versions of the dynamics that characterise personalist governance. Such leaders are surrounded by cult-like intense supporters, who sustain the idea of the head of state's competence and unquestionable legitimacy, even as he turns public office into a vehicle for private enrichment for himself and his allies. Government, party and media are diverted to defend him from investigations and neutralise anyone who tries to expose potential wrongdoing, such as prosecutors and journalists.
The success of personalist leaders at co-opting elites and the bonds they forge with their grassroots followers—who believe in the leader because he professes to believe in them— make such rulers hard to shake. And they are far more dangerous than leaders who adhere to democratic norms if they fear their power is threatened. Because their goal is not public welfare but preserving their position (or perhaps maintaining immunity from prosecution), the prospect of being ousted inspires desperate acts, such as continuing an unsuccessful war or starting a new armed conflict. Political scientists call this phenomenon “gambling for resurrection” and most autocrats eventually lose the wager. More than 80% of personalist leaders who left office in autocratic regimes between 1946 and 2010 did so only under some form of coercion.
The storming of America’s Capitol on January 6th fit in with this tradition. Mr Trump had already survived two impeachment trials, sexual-assault accusations, an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and media reports that he didn’t pay income taxes on questionable grounds—all before he lost the election.
His last-ditch attempt to stay in power—an American version of an “autogolpe” or self-coup—drew on the allegiance of his mix of grassroots and elite supporters. Some 57 Republican state and local officials took part in the riot at the Capitol. The acting defence secretary, Christopher Miller, reportedly had three goals for the last weeks of Mr Trump's presidency: no major war, no military coup, no troops fighting citizens on the streets—which sums up the volatile situations strongmen create on their way down.
The personality cults of strongmen, and the patronage networks they build through corruption and intimidation, can pay off in case of defeat. Strikingly, being ejected from power merely nourishes their victim identity. If they maintain control over their parties and allies, and retain their bond with followers, they can be victorious in returning to office, as Mr Berlusconi did in 2008 and Mr Trump may do in 2024.
The anti-authoritarian playbook
So what works to push back against personalist leaders and the elites that enable them? It's obviously easier in established democracies with strong legal, political and civic institutions. And the course and timing of action depends on how entrenched they are: how far the process of autocratic capture of the media, the courts, parliament and the economy has advanced. The opposition’s room for manoeuvre differs in Russia (where Vladimir Putin has been in power for more than 20 years) from that in Brazil (where Jair Bolsonaro has governed for less than three years), or in Italy and America.
Yet despite these differences, there are time-tested tools to resist autocrats, which can be effective at moments of psychological exhaustion or financial distress from corruption, mismanagement of public institutions and other crises. The playbook includes exposing corruption, encouraging defections of elites who enable strongmen, applying pressure through foreign institutions, encouraging unity among the leader’s opponents, and prosecuting illegality and pursuing legal reform once the strongman is out of power.
Personalist leaders can be particularly vulnerable to anti-corruption campaigns. While they are expert at maintaining plausible deniability for their misdeeds, only they sit atop the power verticals they build. And because elites in personalist states—be it democracies or autocracies—are often pitted against each other to ensure loyalty, the leader can pay the price should any thievery or incompetence jeopardise the “authoritarian bargain,” ie, the support among elites for restrictions on political rights in return for economic gain.
The smaller the power-and-profit-sharing circles are, the more malaise there will be among the have-nots, which may include many influential upper-middle-class citizens and large exile communities. (Business leaders in particular bear a special responsibility for preventing strongman rule, and should keep in mind that those who help him on his way up are often cast aside when they are no longer needed.)
Mr Putin's Russia is a good example. Not only do the richest 3% of Russians hold 90% of the country's assets, according to a study in 2018, but all other businesspeople are targets of state predation. Thousands of business owners have gone into self-exile to escape the fates of more than 100,000 entrepreneurs who had been jailed or faced criminal proceedings. By 2018, one-in-six business owners in the country faced prosecution. This is not a viable long-term strategy for growth or elite co-optation. It is one reason why Mr Putin amended the Russian constitution to protect himself from removal from power.
In fact, exposure of the personalist leader's corruption can tarnish his reputation in the eyes of those who may approve of his human-rights violations and other awful actions. The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who posed as a selfless saviour of the nation, retained influence in business circles and as head of the armed forces when he left office in 1990. It took the 2005 revelation that the Generalissimo had squirrelled away millions of dollars in American and British offshore bank accounts to rupture his authority among religious and business elites.
That's why it is essential for democracies and the international organisations that support them to maximise the use of existing anti-corruption mechanisms. These range from Magnitsky laws that impose sanctions against foreign individuals involved in corruption, to the recently-established Congressional Caucus against Foreign Corruption and Kleptocracy. President Joe Biden sends the wrong message in deciding to waive sanctions on Mr Putin’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline: any profits from it are likely to go not towards improving Russian society, but to benefiting Mr Putin’s loyalists. And the European Union helps autocracy, not democracy, when it gives funding to strongmen like Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who is accused of using EU funding to finance his patronage network.
When personalist leaders leave office, vigorous action against corruption and in support of the rule of law must follow promptly, if circumstances permit. The Italian center-left politicians learned this the hard way when they did not pass anti-corruption reform or punish Mr Berlusconi in 2006. Far from preventing polarisation, their non-actions seemed to vindicate the former prime minister’s claim that the corruption charges against him were a “witch hunt” by journalists and prosecutors. He was back in office two years later.
The peculiar endurance of personalist leaders is one reason it is so important to hold Mr Trump accountable. His influence will not dissipate until the institutions of democracy formally confirm misconduct, for example with a court conviction. In the meantime, the Republican Party is behaving as elites sometimes do in the wake of an authoritarian's exit: they are continuing the leader's antidemocratic agenda, in this case by changing the laws below the national level.
Sadly, removing the personalist ruler does not ensure the health of democracy: illiberal systems of government can re-emerge quickly. It is another reason to learn from history and do everything possible to make sure such figures don't get power in the first place. But when they do emerge, there is a playbook to put in practice to stand up for democracy, individual rights and the rule of law.
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Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a history professor at New York University and the author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present” (W.W. Norton, 2020). She publishes Lucid, a newsletter about threats to democracy.
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