Book Club in Review
Today’s Banner & Backbone Media Anti Fascist Book Club (AFBC) — with Nick Paro Kristofer Goldsmith, Tara Devlin, and Stephanie G Wilson, PhD — returns for their 2nd discussion into Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s authoritative study, Strongmen: From Mussolini to Present, while discussing Chapters 1 and 2 — the chapters that explain how authoritarianism actually begins. Not with tanks in the streets, but with patterns.
From the opening moments of the episode, our discussion reflected the emotional and political weight Ben-Ghiat describes: exhaustion, anger, grief, and a sense that the world feels permanently “on fire or underwater.” That collective mood is a feature of authoritarian systems — one Ben-Ghiat identifies early on as a tactic, not a coincidence.
Exhaustion and burnout is a feature, not a bug.
Strongmen and the Cult of Personality
Several speakers returned to Ben-Ghiat’s analysis of early strongmen—particularly her discussion of Mussolini—as an example of how personal pathology meets institutional opportunity. The team emphasized that strongmen are rarely political geniuses; they are enabled by systems willing to overlook violence, instability, and cruelty in exchange for power or perceived order. This relates back to a quote from George Orwell’s 1984, where he introduces the Party’s slogan:
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
These themes resonated throughout the team’s conversation: fascism doesn’t succeed because one person is dangerous, but because elites, media, and political institutions decide to accommodate them.
That lesson became especially relevant as speakers discussed modern figures whose incompetence is often underestimated, even as their systems grow more sophisticated.
Cruelty Is the Point
A major thread of the show echoed one of Ben-Ghiat’s clearest lessons from Chapters 1–2: cruelty is not accidental — it is the point.
The team talked about how authoritarian movements rely on unrelenting cruelty to exhaust the public, fracture solidarity, and normalize abuse. This cruelty manifests itself through threats, harassment, disinformation, or institutional bullying, cruelty serves to signal dominance and discourage participation. Note how Kristofer Goldsmith wasn’t in the beginning of the discussion because he was on the phone with the FBI after a threat was made against his and his family’s lives.
The team noted that disengagement — often framed as self-care — is precisely what these systems are designed to produce. Ben-Ghiat’s work helped reframe burnout as a political outcome, not a personal failure.
Undermining Trust to Consolidate Power
Our discussion also dove deeply into Ben-Ghiat’s warning about the erosion of democratic trust. The team debated how strongmen hollow out institutions by attacking elections, media credibility, and the rule of law — all while still maintaining the appearance, or illusion, of democracy.
The team focused in on the need for precision — with out language and actions — because defending democracy requires strengthening trust without denying real institutional failures. Strongmen thrive in chaos and cynicism, but blind faith is not the answer either. We highlighted that transparent systems, accountable institutions, and active civic participation is how we go on offense for the cause of reclaiming democracy.
Class Solidarity vs. Authoritarian Loyalty
One of the clearest connections to Strongmen came through the discussion of class solidarity. Ben-Ghiat describes how strongmen redirect economic anger away from systems of extraction and toward scapegoats, replacing shared class solidarity with loyalty to a single masculine figure.
The team stressed that resisting this requires a horizontal alignment of people — recognizing shared struggles across political and cultural divides. We framed this not as abstraction, but as the learned lesson for organizing: fascism fractures communities; democracy depends on rebuilding them.
“You Are the Institution”
The team closed there discussion by returning to a theme implicit throughout Ben-Ghiat’s early chapters: authoritarianism advances when people wait for someone else to intervene — or more simply put, we are the change we’ve been waiting for.
We emphasized that institutions are only as strong as the people willing to defend and reclaim them. Journalism, legal accountability, local organizing, mutual aid, and civic engagement were framed as acts of patriotism — not heroics, but responsibilities.
The overall takeaway from today: there is no one coming to save us — we have to go on offense for democracy ourselves.
Where to find resources
How to Access the material
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Thank you Neurodivergent Hodgepodge, Beth Cruz, Cris, P. J. Schuster, Kevin Paquette, and many others for tuning into my live video with Stephanie G Wilson, PhD, Tara Devlin, Kristofer Goldsmith, and Nick Paro! Join me for my next live video in the app.
Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes
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