Marc Elias: Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, welcome to Defending Democracy.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Thank you, I'm delighted to be speaking with you.
Marc Elias: All right, so in your book, Strongmen, you actually predicted that Donald Trump would not willingly or easily or peacefully, pick your term, leave office after he lost in 2020. And boy, if that wasn't the prediction of a lifetime. Tell me why you were so right when so few people, frankly, called this in advance.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I think my study of autocrats for years, which is distilled in that book, made me very aware of what they most fear, which is losing the protections of the Office of Head of State so they can be prosecuted or just have the shame of having to leave office before they want to. That's why they enact the playbook we're living through now and have been since 2020. I also turned in the book at the end of the summer of 2020, and I saw how the Trump administration was reacting to the social movement of Black Lives Matter and starting to try and activate the military. And so I concluded that there was pretty much no way that he was going to leave office without trying something. In subsequent interviews during the fall through December, I continued to feel that way. At one point I said to, I think it was Business Insider, "It's going to be a rocky road; we should prepare."
Marc Elias: It's funny, I view the presidential immunity decision as entirely terrible, right? The idea that presidents can't be prosecuted for anything has made Donald Trump more reckless. But is there a silver lining in your study that maybe he's not afraid of criminal prosecution this time and therefore is more likely to leave?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: No, I think that the longer they are in office and the more corrupt they become. There's never been a strongman who gets into office and feels comfortable and says, "I'm going to be less corrupt now." Because what people need to understand is the whole purpose of governance for autocrats is not at all what we think of in democracies. They're not interested in public welfare. They're not interested in doing good for the country. They're interested in making money off of public office and arranging the system — including elections and government institutions, the judiciary — so they feel safe.
So they become untouchable by the law, whatever that means for whatever crimes. Part of this is you also put into positions of high power people who share your views or have their own sketchy past with the law. And so a kind of conversion of the political class and the official class happens where you get people who are at their very worst. And those are the people that the strongman needs to have around him.
Marc Elias: One of the things that I have been struck with is how many people ask me, "Are there not going to be elections?" And I always say — and I want you to fact-check whether this is true or not — I always say, "No, no, there'll be elections because dictators love elections. They don't like free and fair elections.” Right? They don't like elections where they might lose, but the pageantry of elections they seem to quite like. At least that's been my experience growing up in the United States watching, for example, the Soviet Union and its elections and Vladimir Putin and his election. Is that true, though, or do some dictators not like elections at all?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: No, it's an interesting subject. Every dictator has some form of election. Often they're called referenda or plebiscites. Those are occasions that are highly staged, highly engineered in most cases. Mussolini had one in 1934 after he'd done a big shakeup that was very unpopular and the economy wasn't doing very well. So he had a big plebiscite so he could claim that 99% of the population was for him. Think about it, we had them in the occupied areas of Ukraine, and so Putin was able to say, "Look, everyone wants to have these annexed." So that's how dictators use special elections.
But they also, as you well know, hollow out the actual elections. So you keep elections going today in the 21st century, but you game the system, also through dominating the media so the opposition's message, as in Hungary, isn't even heard by many people anymore. You game the system so that the elections tend to come out the way you want them to. And if they don't, you say they were rigged. And now, the new playbook in Brazil didn't go well for Bolsonaro in the end, and then with Trump, you have a kind of private army of thugs that attempts to have justice for this rigged election that you lost.
Marc Elias: Yeah, so you actually anticipated my next question, which is I have always assumed that Donald Trump would have official state power — the military, ICE, the FBI, the official apparatus of the state — and then there would be this sort of quasi-militia-type movement that would be on the outside and would be able to, through intimidation and not official sanction, enforce his expectations. I think in my head, I've sort of modeled that off of pre-World War II Europe. But I'm curious if you think that that is something we are going to see emerge more of or whether that is not necessary in the most modern states because state power is so strong.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I think even where state power is strong, most autocrats develop some kind of informal or paramilitary force — it has different forms and names in different places — that does their personal bidding. It depends on the structure of the state. In fascist Italy, which is a very interesting example, Mussolini had the king. And the king was the one who actually put him in power, which is why Italians voted to get rid of the monarchy after the long nightmare of fascism was over. But the king was the commander-in-chief, which is very sad because at any time at the beginning, the king could have ordered the only 30,000 squadristi thugs to disband, but he never did. So Mussolini wasn't sure about the military, so he put all the squadristi and blackshirts into the Fascist Militia. And who did it answer to? Him.
So there are various ways that dictators do this. Or when they're even coming to power, like Duterte did in the Philippines, you ally with gangs. And there becomes this big gray zone of official, non-official helpers, "little green men" like in Russia, biker gangs. It's different in every place. So what we had, of course, on January 6th, as I said before, Trump could not get the military to play his game, and so he had his private army of thugs and launched them. It's very interesting that we see ICE being hugely boosted so that it's going to have an operating budget which is equal to the entire budget for military forces in foreign countries such as Brazil.
ICE is not a private militia of civilians; however, it's being steered to do Trump’s bidding, and it's attracting as a corps more extreme people. That's why they're allowed to have civilian-looking garb. They show their tattoos, they customize their gloves, they're masked. A big difference to regular cops or military. So that's how it's kind of playing out so far. And then of course today we had Hegseth speaking to the military, and that's a whole other push forward: the idea that the regular military should be used against the real enemy, which is at home.
Marc Elias: I think for a lot of people, they think of Trump and they try to graft him onto the historical person that they are most attuned to. Given my background, I immediately think of Germany in the '30s, and I think of Vladimir Putin today. Other people, I'll hear them talk about Viktor Orbán, who candidly I know less about, or South American dictators. You are actually a scholar in Mussolini. I've heard people talk about Franco and what went on in Spain. I've heard people compare Trump to the Red Scare in the United States, which was a little different. That wasn't really a dictatorial movement, but it was sort of adjacent. Are we all just searching for the right historical analogy or is there a commonality?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: There are certain commonalities in their kind of playbook—and that's what I laid out in Strongmen: corruption, violence, machismo, propaganda. They do watch each other, and they are influenced by each other. But of course, each time and place is unique, and each one puts together his style of rule in his own way, even though their personalities are quite similar. This was one of the most disturbing things when I wrote the book: as I suspected, Trump's personality and his governing style in its impulsivity is quite similar in something called "personalist rule."
Governance, as I said before, is about enriching yourself, amassing power, but it's really about recasting government and all the systems of government so that they respond to your personal needs, obsessions, and fears, such as prosecution.
Governance becomes an expression of your personal concerns, desires, and quirks. There are many instances in authoritarian history of impulsive decisions or opinions that are held that are very unorthodox or quirky, such as Erdoğan's economic policies, that nobody shares and economists think is a bad idea. But they have surrounded themselves with yes-men and sycophants and loyalists so that over time, and certainly in long regimes, nobody gives them objective feedback. So policy becomes the whims of today. Even Hitler, people think Hitler was so stable; he was not. And he and Mussolini would change their minds day by day on what they wanted to do, and everybody had to rush to get with the new party line, which was the will of the Führer.
Marc Elias: Most of us learned in history that there was this alliance between Hitler and Mussolini. In going back and reading more, the two of them actually for a very long time did not like each other. Mussolini, who predates Hitler in power by a fair chunk of time, he seemed at best skeptical of the race, the anti-Jewish sort of core of what became Nazism. And of course, Stalin and Hitler hated each other, obviously. So there seemed to be a lack of affinity. I don't know where Franco fits into all of this, but there seemed to be a strong dislike among all of these strongmen. When I think of Donald Trump, he seems to love strongmen. He seems to admire strongmen. So tell us a little bit about that period of time and why the strongmen then maybe didn't get along.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: They did get along, but the thing about this type of personality is they are transactional, 100 percent, in everything — private life, public life, governance — and they're amoral. So today's friend is tomorrow's enemy. They learn from each other, and if they think that the other has something to offer, they will ally. But then, as happened with Hitler and Stalin, the next day maybe they would just go back on that and actually perhaps invade the person who was their faithful ally before.
With Hitler and Mussolini, that's a very interesting story.
Mussolini is actually more appropriate for today's autocrats as a model because he came in very fast. He founded fascism from nothing. He founded it in 1919, and by 1922, he was already prime minister. Then over three years of being prime minister of a democracy, he chipped away at the system. He started persecuting people, sending his thugs to beat up people. And then he declared a dictatorship in '25 to escape an investigation that was going to force him out of power because he had a rival killed and he was also very corrupt, and all of this was going to come out.
So Hitler worshipped Mussolini, because Hitler did not have an easy path to power. He had his putsch that was modeled on Mussolini's March on Rome, but it failed. He was sent to prison, and when he got out, he had speaking bans in German states, and nobody wanted to buy Mein Kampf, which was a huge, wordy, verbose mess. He couldn't find a publisher, so finally the Nazi party had to publish it. In the meantime, Mussolini had become a world icon for anti-communists. He even had a syndicated column that reached 1,000 American newspapers, courtesy of his admirer William Randolph Hearst.
So Hitler worshipped Mussolini. He even had a bust of him on his desk, and other Nazis would make fun of him, saying that he suffered from, quote, "Mussolini intoxication." In the end though, Hitler was influenced by Mussolini because he decided he didn't want to take the slow path to consolidating power. He used the Reichstag fire and he did everything very, very fast. He learned about personality cults from Mussolini, but he also learned that he wanted to do things instantaneously.
Marc Elias: Yeah, now I think you've said now twice that one of the hallmarks of these folks is that they surround themselves with incompetence or sycophants. And that is actually one of the things that Hannah Arendt observed in her study of the Nazi regime. Why is it that these regimes attract incompetence among their leadership?I don't want to directly compare Donald Trump to Mussolini or Hitler, but it does also seem like in a second administration, he too is surrounding himself by less competent people. As he's going along, you would think the Republican Party would warm to him and therefore more doors would open for more competent people to come in, and instead, it's like the opposite has happened.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yeah, it's a structural thing that is about their personality and the way they want to govern, and it transcends political lines. It's about dictatorship or autocracy. Because they are very insecure people behind their bravura, they don't really want to hear any opinions that contradict theirs. Mussolini's slogan was "Mussolini is always right."
Marc Elias: Really? Wow. I've heard that more recently.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yes, you have. And because this was fascist Italy, it was even emblazoned in giant letters on buildings, on public streets and squares. It was a major propaganda theme. Mussolini ha sempre ragione. They don't really want to be challenged. In fact, it's a paradoxical thing: the more power they get, the more they fear criticism and losing that power. Also, the more corrupt they become, the more violent they become. They become more fearful of the population or people from within the regime who might try and depose them. So all of these things lead them to surround themselves more and more with people they consider safe. Look at Trump with Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio was a big critic, and then whatever process went on, Trump feels that he has broken him sufficiently to give him — how many jobs does Marco Rubio have? Like three major jobs. Because he's now the trusted man.
Over time, you get a governance structure, and it's replicated within institutions because professionalism and expertise are not actually what is valued. Loyalty, sometimes fanaticism — meaning you will see those ideological goals to the end no matter what it takes — those are not the qualities of a democratic administration where you let the facts determine your case. They operate in a totally different zone with different intentions.
Marc Elias: So I think that a lot of Americans think that these strongmen come to power through violent means. I think that people haven't understood what the Reichstag fire was and the role it played. Hitler actually was put in place as the result of elections; it was part of a democratic transition. The same is true with Erdoğan, the same is true with Mussolini. So talk about that a little bit. Why is it that democracies can so quickly flip from a system of free and fair elections where you have a peaceful transfer of power to being used to put people in place that then undermine those things? All of the safeguards seem to crumble really quickly, right? In Italy it was three years.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yeah, and then there's all the people who come to power via coup, and then, of course, it's instantaneous. But the same dynamics hold, regardless of how they come to power. The elections question is really interesting because democracy is predicated on a kind of faith in the system. So often autocrats and bad actors, who want to be autocrats, realize that they can use the system to undermine it. There's a famous Goebbels quote to this effect.
They can use the good faith of democratic institutions and the way Democrats approach governance to undermine it from within. Increasingly, that is what's happened: autocrats get elected, sometimes on false pretenses, sometimes not. The things Trump is doing now, he advertised most of them very, very clearly. We can't say we should be surprised. People were holding signs for mass deportation. He was talking about liberating the heartland with military force, all of that.
But the sad thing is that once autocrats get power, they hollow out institutions. What this means for elections is that everything becomes a kind of simulation. It's drained of meaning. You have elections, but they don't mean what they did before. Then people say, "Well, what's the use of elections?" And if you're in a deteriorating democracy, it's very dangerous because people — I hear it all the time and I always push back — say, "What's the use of voting? You can't outvote autocracy." This is nihilistic. I'm very strong on this. It's never too late. This is one of my maxims of resistance: You use the tools and spaces you have now, while you have them, because you don't know if you'll have them one day. You have them now. To give up on elections because there are extreme forms of gerrymandering or suppression or threats of violence is just a sad capitulation in its own way.
Marc Elias: I agree with that 100%. I preach that all the time, that Donald Trump wants us to be hopeless. He wants us to think he's all-powerful. He wants us to give up and not feel like there's any point in fighting back. He wants us to not vote. But then I also hear people say something that I also struggle with. They will say, "Well, you know, we are getting close to crossing the Rubicon." Or "if we get to a constitutional crisis..." I heard this interview that really impacted me, and I wish I could remember the name of the gentleman, but he runs an independent opposition media entity against Erdoğan. He said that for the longest period of time, people were saying, "Well, it's not good, but we're still a democracy."
People didn't want to acknowledge that they had crossed into something. And I feel like we also have that going on. Where people are like, "Well, the National Guard is in a city, but it's only temporary." Now of course they're in a bunch of cities, and they're spreading like wildfire. And as you say, he's told the military to be prepared to combat the enemy within. So how do you balance those two things?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yeah. It's difficult. For example, İmamoğlu, the opposition leader in Turkey, is one of my heroes. He was jailed in March and stripped of being the mayor of Istanbul for the sole purpose of making it impossible for him to run for president, because Erdoğan knows that he is going to defeat him. He tried everything else and then he got more and more panicked. The reason I'm talking about this is this is the limit of electoral autocracy. This is the limit of the sham idea that you as an autocrat are going to keep elections going and everything's just fine. Erdoğan has said to CNN before, "We have elections. I'm not a dictator." Well, he was stuck. What happened in 2019, he provoked a rerun saying there were irregularities, and İmamoğlu got even more votes. The guy is unstoppable. So what is his autocrat solution? Lock him up. They all do.
They all arrive sooner or later at a place where their scams can't go on any longer and they have to reveal themselves for what they are. Yet, until this happened in March, Turkish people could say, "It can always get worse." It could be like China. It could be a one-party state. "We still have multiple parties," they would say in Turkey. So I think it's a tough and interesting question. This is why I say we use the tools and spaces that we have in our country at this time now. We recognize how precious they are and that they could be changed or banned or gone. Thus we are where we are, and we have to fight to retain that rather than naming it as something.
Marc Elias: It does. I recently read a book about the dual state, written by a Jewish attorney in Nazi Germany. The thesis is that you essentially have these two legal systems going on simultaneously: one that appears to be roughly rule-of-law-oriented and one that is highly personalistic to the whims of the dictator. I gather something like that has been going on in Turkey as well. Number one, is that a characteristic that we find in other authoritarian regimes? It does feel like we are starting to see that develop in the United States, where for certain kinds of crimes, everything is very normal.
Right now, all around America, people are on trial in what would undeniably be normal, due-process-like procedures. Then you have these other legal proceedings that are going on that are highly irregular, whether they're companies settling bogus claims or whether they're the indictment of James Comey. Nothing about these legal procedures appears anything like what you would have anticipated normal actors, including the state, to be doing. I'm curious if that has historical or comparative political salience to you and how this tension is able to hold itself over time.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I would frame it a little differently. There's a reason that Hannah Arendt classified Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarian, because they truly were. At a certain point, Hans Frank, the Minister of Justice, who later was rewarded for his corruption — he was also Hitler's personal lawyer. He led a successful campaign to have Hitler's personal will recognized as the law. Now that's totalitarianism. Whatever Hitler feels becomes the law and needs no further justification.
Marc Elias: Correct. That's right, and eventually judges were told they were to anticipate what Hitler's personal will would be. That was their highest calling.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yes. And this is called "Working Toward the Führer." This goes back to our very interesting conversation about the types of people they surround themselves with. People who themselves have been hollowed out. They're like pliant tools of the leader. All of these people are supposed to, because they have no morals of their own, anticipate and do what they think the leader would want them to do, because they know that's how you get ahead. That's how you get the all-important blessing of the leader.
But going back to the question of the law, in reality, in Nazi Germany, the only dual state of law was that if you were Aryan, you could have a semblance of justice. If your landlord was ripping you off, you could get justice for that. If you were not an Aryan — if you were targeted, and it wasn't just Jews, it was leftists, Jehovah's Witnesses, all kinds of people — there was no justice for you. None. So that's in a totalitarian state. The place that the dual system is more operative is in today's 21st-century situations where the leader has not gone yet to the one-party state, or maybe never will, and there are still opposition parties. There's still a semblance of opposition, including in the judiciary. And so some people — it's always an increasing, then decreasing number — can get a semblance of justice.
Marc Elias: If at one end you have a perfectly functioning democracy, and at the other end, you have a completely closed totalitarian state, we're not at either, right? We've never been at the first, so this is always gradations. How do you grade? What are the guideposts that we should be using in our head to judge where we were, where we are, and where we should worry about going next?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I'm not a legal expert, but one of the areas in which the resistance to autocracy has been most successful in America is the legal area. Numerous judges have turned back the claims and all the different cases that are autocratic or vengeance justice. Because I want to stress that the people in charge now in America — Stephen Miller, et cetera — they have a very holistic vision of how to proceed. This is an autocratic vision. Autocrats do things holistically, from their propaganda where you have talking points that are standardized and disseminated through all institutions. That's one of the most challenging and disturbing things for me, is that they have a holistic plan. It comes from Project 2025.
So what we see going on is that the judiciary, for example, has not been completely purged yet, and so you're able to get these results. Also, for example, numerous lawyers have been locked up in Turkey. İmamoğlu's lawyer was locked up, and then İmamoğlu's lawyer's lawyer. I wanted to tell you that story because this has happened in other places. First the lawyer, then the lawyer of the lawyer. So we are not there yet.
Marc Elias: This happens in Russia.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Now I also want to say that, what are we, month nine? There is no equivalent in the speed at which this is happening among 20th-century or 21st-century leaders who came to office via election.
Marc Elias: Wow, really? So what was the timeframe in Turkey?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Like after 2014, but it's really after the coup attempt against him in 2016.
Marc Elias: Wow, so this is really fast in the United States.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: And the same with Russia, even Russia under Putin. Putin's been there as long as Mussolini; he's been there 25 years. Orbán's been there as long as Hitler. These people have been there a long time. So today we look at them and say, "Okay, the U.S. is looking like Orbán's Hungary with the elections," but Orbán's been there since 2010, and Trump has been there 10 months.
Marc Elias: What about our country makes it easier for it to move faster, or is it not something structural?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Well, he was there before, and many things that are going on were rehearsed and thought about, but they were just unable to do them. He didn't have the right partners. Then they also used their time out of power brilliantly, to the point that he was able to keep his personality cult extremely active and robust, even though he had lost the election — but of course, he says he didn't. For four years out of power, he was able to keep being leader number one. That's very unusual. And they had Project 2025 as a shadow government. So there'll be books written on this. They used their time beautifully, and that's how they were able to move so fast.
Marc Elias: I think if there's one question I get, as much as any other, it is people who are angry, frustrated, and quizzical. I think if you would ask people a year ago, when Donald Trump was reemerging, what the checks and balances would be if he got re-elected, I think number one, people would have overestimated how much of a check and balance his political appointees would be. Then they would have said, "Well, you have these multinational corporations that operate across borders and have standards they have to abide by. They're not going to bend to any one ruler." And that the large media organizations will flourish. And then the third is, I think they would have said, "Look, the law firms. They pride themselves on fighting hard." And yet we have seen the complete opposite of that. So talk to us a little bit.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yeah, I'm taking notes. There's a lot there. About the last thing you said about the capitulations, unfortunately, in history, the more people have assets and resources, the more they feel they have to lose. In fact, an interesting thing, for the corruption chapter of Strongmen, I studied the history of corruption. What you see is often, you staff your government with a lot of very, very wealthy people. The way you get to them is by giving them something that they're going to fear they'll lose. And that often is their reputations, thus, kompromat. Through Roy Cohn — it's not just the Kremlin playbook — Trump learned from Roy Cohn and Roger Stone that you give people a reason to worry they're going to lose something, have secrets exposed, or just lose their position and their status. That seems to work, not just in America; it's a syndrome I observed. It seems to work very well to keep people in line and get the people who you most think would be independent, because they can be, to instead be the people who either obey in advance or they obey immediately.
Marc Elias: One of my obsessions with what Trump is doing is this distinction between capitulation and collaboration. It feels to me like some of what we are calling capitulation to me looks more like collaboration. It may have started as a form of capitulation, but now these folks have become sort of business partners with Donald Trump. They're full in. They're not really the victims. Capitulation kind of suggests a weakness, but a victim status, and these folks, I think, have transformed beyond that. So is that common to see, and do you agree that some of this is that?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I'm glad you brought the lawyer's precision to this because in fact, one of the main things I work with in my book is called "authoritarian bargains." These are partnerships, you're right, they're collaborations. There is an initial capitulation, but here's another thing just quickly: people sometimes think, "If I do this one thing, I'm good." No. It's the same in organized crime; there's a lot of overlap. If you do the one thing, the aggressor knows you're weak, and then he's going to do it again. So you end up with these collaborations. They are absolutely central to keeping a state going. They're collaborations with faith leaders, certainly business leaders, finance, obviously party politicians. The bargain is, "I will make you rich or keep you safe. In return, you are loyal to me, you don't oppose me," or depending on how stringent the requests are, "you have to sing my praises in public." Then you get to Tim Cook and others. But it's a bargain, it's a partnership, and they are very effective. Think about Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church.
The classic fascists had them. It's interesting, if you look at China, that was a great authoritarian bargain: "I don't give you many rights, but you are going to be prosperous." When the economic downturn started, if something happens to make the bargain tenuous, the leader can get more insecure. So what's very scandalous and shameful to me now is the silence of business and finance elites when there are nonsensical and dangerous and harmful things going on that affect the economy and our public health and prosperity, defined in a very broad way. Most of them have been silent.
Marc Elias: I think to say "most of them" understates it. I think the silence of the business community will go down as one of this generation's greatest shames. We can talk about the shame of the big law firms, the shame of the media institutions. Believe me, there has been no one tougher on big law firms than I am. But pound for pound, watching, as you say, the tech leaders... These folks have so much power. These folks could influence and protect democracy. The finance community. When was the last time we heard from a major bank in the United States defending democracy?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: That's what I mean. It's tragic. And it's interesting if you look at the history of some of these banks, too. There was recently JP Morgan Chase and Epstein's collaboration. And you know what I thought of is that soon after Mussolini declared a dictatorship, the economy wasn't going very well for him. Who bailed him out, giving him international legitimation? The House of Morgan, as the bank was then known, gave him a billion-dollar loan when he most needed it, both internally and on the world stage. That started the big partnership.
Marc Elias: I have done a lot of reading on some of the Soviet dissidents. You mentioned the mayor of Istanbul who's jailed and who is one of your heroes. What can we learn from the dissident movement? I don't just mean the non-collaborator movement or even what ordinary citizens can do. What can we learn from people who truly we now think of as heroes, who were willing to go to great lengths and great personal risk? Is that a necessary component? Is it necessary to have those figures, or can masses of people — I think of the mass protests in some countries — can that substitute for that?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Ideally you're going to have both. It's very important for people to have heroes. And frankly, authoritarians have been better at having them. That's what cults of personality are about. But it's very important for people to have figures who they can look up to who are doing the right thing on their behalf at a time when the government has become either negligent or actually an actively hostile force. It's very scary for people to realize that not only do their leaders not care if they live or die, sometimes they do things that accelerate the opposite of well-being. In that situation, the dissident who is not one of the wealthy, powerful people usually... they can come from any social class, but they are often operating alone or on a small scale against power. That is very inspiring to people and it encourages others to have their courage and go out perhaps to protest. There are many ways we can resist or protest; you don't have to be in the streets.
The other thing is that I've read much in the literature of dissidents, and I have a chapter on resistance in my book. They are resilient. They play a long game. Some of the names you mentioned are people who were in interminably long dictatorships — communism, decades and decades. You need a certain mentality that is resilient and also doesn't give up hope. There's a friend of mine who's an artist, a Chinese dissident who lives in exile. He told me, because the Chinese government is always trying to get his exhibitions in foreign countries canceled, "My personal ethos is like the myth of Sisyphus. I feel like I'm trying, and then it gets foiled. But the act of trying is important regardless of the result, because it's an example to others." I think that often in America, we're not used to this. We like things to resolve quickly. We're just not used to this kind of long game. We haven't had to be used to it, although we have many examples from the civil rights movement, which we're absolutely not talking about enough. That was a long game, and it was ultimately successful. So I think being resilient, using the tools that you have, whatever they are, never losing hope. People can get very cynical about hope, but it's very important.
Watch the full interview here.
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