How a strongman rises

Throughout history, from the late Roman Republic to modern democracy, the same figure keeps appearing: the strongman who turns up in times of uncertainty with a single promise. I alone can fix it. He wears different clothes each time, speaks a different language each time, but the mechanism that carries him upward is strikingly constant. And understanding that mechanism, regardless of whether you admire or detest a particular leader, is one of the most valuable things a free thinker can learn. Not in order to cheer or to curse, but to see what is really happening.

The recipe

The ingredients are almost always the same, four in number. One: a period of real or perceived crisis, economic upheaval, a lost war, a humiliation, or rapid cultural change that leaves people feeling displaced. Two: a widespread sense that the existing elite has failed, is corrupt, or has betrayed ordinary people. And note this, the feeling is enough, whether it is justified or not. Three: the promise of restoration, often of an idealised past that never existed the way it is portrayed, make it great again. And four: the personification of the solution in a single man who claims to stand above the system and to be able, for that reason, to bypass it.

Anyone who knows philosophy will recognise the echoes. It is the uprooted, isolated mass that Hannah Arendt described as susceptible to a total narrative and a leader to belong to. It is the ressentiment that Nietzsche pointed to, the transmuted rancour of those who feel hard done by. And it is the fantasised yesterday that serves as a crowbar for the power of tomorrow.

Why it is so dangerous · and so understandable

Here you have to hold two things at once, and that is precisely what is difficult. The first: the strongman often articulates a real problem. People who feel forgotten and abandoned usually do not feel that way without reason. Whoever sees only the leader and not the emptiness he fills will never understand the phenomenon. And will never be able to refute it either. The second, equally true: the solution he embodies, I alone, undermines the very capacity of a society to correct its mistakes. When power is concentrated in a single figure presumed to be infallible, the institutions weaken, the courts, the free press, fair elections, that allow a country to reverse its errors, including the errors of that leader himself.

That is the Popper question, applied to politics, and it cuts in every direction: not only does this leader solve my problem?, but what does his way of governing do to the system's ability to correct the next mistake? That question stands above the parties. It is your best protection against both the naive enthusiasm that says "finally someone who gets things done" and the blind aversion that can only curse and understands nothing.

A thought offered with an open visor, expressly as a hypothesis: perhaps our age resembles the late Roman Republic, the phase in which old institutions lost their authority and strongmen, with popular support or the support of loyal legions, bypassed the order one by one, while a weary people traded freedom for decisiveness. Rome did not become an empire through one seizure, but through a series. Whether our age is such a tipping point, no one knows. It is a pattern that rhymes, not a prediction.