Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. Her work is dedicated to understanding authoritarianism, fascist movements, and threats to democratic governments. She has authored numerous titles with the most recent being Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present which is a historical account of the creation of fascism by Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, along with a commentary on the political rise of Donald Trump and the modern day MAGA movement in U.S. politics.
Dr. Ben-Ghiat visited the University of Iowa as a guest speaker for the UI Lecture Committee on October 3rd, 2024. KRUI had the opportunity to speak to her before her public appearance to talk about her significant research findings on the blueprint of fascist movements, strongmen, and why the MAGA political movement has been so successful just over a month ahead of the 2024 Presidential Election.
Since the time of this conversation, Republican Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have been declared and confirmed as the winner of the Presidential election, and were inaugurated on January 20th, 2025. All comments were made in speculation of a tight race and in the context of rising political tensions between the two parties with the end of campaign season rapidly approaching.
This interview has been edited for clarity.

Julia Anderson: In preparation for speaking with you today, of course, I watched just about every video of yours I could find on YouTube. An interesting fact that you mentioned, that I thought would be a really good starting point here is that 30% of the population at any given time has authoritarian leanings. This is in a global sense, and so according to the trending news today, there are many right-wing political movements happening across the world, such as in Hungary with President Viktor Orbán and in France with the rise of the National Rally Party led by Marine Le Pen. There’s also a couple of others I believe in Germany and whatnot, along with several places in Europe. What distinguishes fascism from other types of nationalist movements, and where do we see fascism rising in the world today?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Yeah, so that’s a great question. I mean, classic fascism was a product of the 1920s and ’30s, with Mussolini being the person who invented fascism. It was very much a product of World War I and the total upheaval of everyone’s lives, with millions and millions of men who were killed and disabled, along with changes in gender relations. One of the things I found in my research, and fascism as the first example, is that authoritarianism is appealing when societies have had a huge amount of change.
World War I was the biggest example, with progress made with gender, racial equity, and the beginning of anti-colonial activities. That leads to a backlash, and so fascism was this very pure form of state driven racism, you know? Nations wanted to turn back the clock and make women kind of the tools of the state for procreation, but only the right kinds of babies. In the Nazi version, it was having the state channel to create a master race, right? That leads to imperialist campaigns of conquering, looting, and plundering. So today, things work differently, and there are many fascist aspects that remain. For example calling people garbage, scum, or vermin, and talking about them as animals. This has remained from fascism. Hitler used it for the Jews. Mussolini used it eventually for Jews, but also for leftists.
There’s the whole idea of needing these hyper nationalist movements to defeat Marxism and defeat communism that comes out of fascism. But things work differently today. There are not as many one party states where there’s no political opposition allowed. Really, it’s places like North Korea and China, which are communist. So fascism remains in its spirit, in its language, and many policies, but today I use the word authoritarian because that encompasses the fact we still have elections. Like in Hungary or Turkey, you have authoritarians, but they have elections and they’re not one party states.
Anderson: Is it possible to see fascism in a democracy such as what we’re seeing across Europe? Are these actually considered fascist movements?
Ben-Ghiat: Some people use the word fascism for them, and there’s a whole debate on this including what we do about Trump and the GOP. Are they fascist? Do they want fascism? So, there’s a debate on whether you could use the word today, right? Or, you want to restrict it, and I’m kind of in the middle where in some ways it’s not useful to label Viktor Orbán a fascist, because then people say, “Well, wait a minute, it’s not a one party state. It’s not a pure dictatorship. So, what are you talking about?” That’s why I use the word authoritarian. Fascism was just the first stage of authoritarianism, which is when the executive, personal power of the leader kind of takes over, and eradicates or highly damages the independence of the judiciary and opposition parties. That allows the leader to have supreme power and even immunity from prosecution.
So, there are many similarities, but definitely some of the same conditions that led to fascism—like people feeling they need to turn the clock back on racial or gender emancipation, all that stuff—that exists today.

Anderson: You brought up a good point a second ago with mentioning how this relates to Donald Trump and the rise of this kind of Trumpism version of Republicanism in American politics. Since the release of your book, which served as an analysis of the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in Italy, he essentially created the blueprint for right wing dictatorship.
As it relates to Donald Trump and with the upcoming election, you’ve spoken very publicly and been very critical of the policies contained in Project 2025, and how they relate to fascism. A common response is, “It can’t happen here in the U.S. We have too many guardrails in place. That really wouldn’t be possible. As entertaining as politics is right now, nothing’s really a threat, an actual tangible threat to our democracy.” But, what is it that experts making this claim, that there is a connection between the two, what are they seeing that indicates that the U.S. is susceptible to a fascist movement?
Ben-Ghiat: Well, we already have many signs of this. So basically, you know, Trump is an authoritarian. He’s in my book. It was one of the first books to put him in historical perspective, look at him and see how does he bring forth not just fascism, but also right wing military dictatorships. Trump has been on record many times saying he wants the military to have a new role. Not just abroad, which has been their role, but also he thinks protesters should be shot. He’s talked about executing generals who are not loyal. He wants the military to be used, in part, for domestic repression.
So, he doesn’t just borrow from fascism, he borrows from these other forms of authoritarianism. What has happened to the GOP since he became president is that in my analysis it’s become an autocratic party. Trump has a genuine leader-call. It’s extraordinary what he’s been able to do. Working in a democracy, he has been able to have this personal control over the party. Now, he has his daughter in law, Laura Trump, who’s the head of the Republican National Committee, and the money is raised from ordinary Republicans around the country. It goes to Trump and not to other campaigns. There’s a lot of personalization of politics, and the GOP is now a party that is dependent on lying, such as the idea that Trump won the 2020 election. Also, they lie about January 6th, which was an attempt to overthrow the government. So that’s an example.
How far have we come down the path of authoritarianism? We already had an attempt to overthrow the government with tens of thousands of people committing violence, along with the GOP, Fox News, and all the other allies that have been trying to cover this up and say it was just terrorists. They said it wasn’t violent, because that’s what you do in history if you’re not done. So, they’re dependent on corruption, on lying, on violence, and that’s how authoritarian parties work. They can’t really have fair and free elections anymore in countries. That’s why they engage in this election denial.
The last thing I’ll say is that we never had a national experience of dictatorship in America, but we had a regional authoritarianism which was the Jim Crow South. We have a long history, and not just in the South, of voter suppression, a lot of which is racially motivated, but also just political trickery, right? So, in places like Ohio the GOP uses voter suppression very effectively. Redistricting and gerrymandering, these are all forms of voter suppression and just trying to game the results so that it’s not really a free and fair election, even though it seems to be. So, we have all this history and that’s why it can happen here, but it always looks different. That’s why people don’t see it coming. When you analyze something like the tool book of global authoritarianism, and then look at our history here, you see how they meet.
Trump was very smart from the very beginning in 2016 to address himself to all kinds of extremists, including southern racists who never liked Barack Obama, never thought he should have been there, along with neo-Nazis and the militias. So, he created a big tent so that everybody could be part of his Trumpism and that’s why some people would say, “Okay, well, isn’t he repeating fascism?” and in part, he is, but he’s also activating things that are specific to our country, if that makes sense.

Anderson: Yes, it does seem that his popularity increased with this emotional appeal. It was like an appeal to people that felt like they had been forgotten, given that they weren’t at the forefront of the progress being made for people that have historically been left behind.
As a response, as you mentioned, the GOP does use a lot of rhetoric to combat against claims that they’re fascists, such as blaming the left, accusing the “the radical left” of being a fascist, or an authoritarian movement that’s attempting to oust him from politics and disrupt the democratic process. Is there any validity or any weight to those claims, or are they simply just diversion tactics?
Ben-Ghiat: That part is diversion tactics. I call it the upside down world of authoritarianism, you take everything and you flip it. So, a diversionary tactic is claiming that when Joe Biden stepped aside due to age and a sense that he wasn’t as effective as he could have been, and Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee, the Republicans are saying that was a coup attempt. What we have to pay attention to is the big narrative lines they use, and one of them is that it’s the Democrats who are authoritarians. They’re very good at doing that.
But you brought up something really important about the validity of all this. Democrats had kind of neglected white working class people and rural populations. The Biden administration has hugely corrected this, both with like manufacturing policies and stuff about addressing the opioid rhetoric epidemic, right? But they were a population that was not served by Democrats. So, Trump is a marketer at heart, and he’s a brilliant marketer. He’s not the first one, there are others in my book who scan the political marketplace and see who is underserved, and is going to be susceptible to his appeals. He doesn’t care about the working class, but he came to them and he said, “You’ve been forgotten. I love you, and I will fix it for you,” and of course they voted for him. Here was somebody speaking to them directly, and authoritarians from Mussolini, Berlusconi, even Putin do the same. They know how to use emotion to make people feel they care about them.
There are huge crowds at Trump rallies. They feel that he loves them, and he’s very good at making them think that. So, he went and he said, “You were forgotten.” Democrats didn’t have anything to compete with that. Emotion is extremely important, and it’s actually been authoritarians who have known how to use emotion until very recently, with the Kamala Harris joy and love sentiment. That’s really recent, but Hillary Clinton was not a joy and love type of emotional person. It was Trump who knew how to do that, and he gets credit for that. I believe it’s a terrible tragedy for our nation that he doesn’t actually care about the American people. He cares about his own power and riches, but he’s very good at making people feel like he cares about them.
Anderson: As someone who has obsessively watched the news since probably 2016—even when I was a little too young to understand exactly what was going on—I could tell the emotional appeal was strong, even if you don’t have much of a political background. Donald Trump on TV is someone that anyone can understand. Just breaking down his vocabulary, it’s not the most complex, but it appeals to people and it’s accessible.
Ben-Ghiat: There are studies that he, especially in the whole 2016 campaign and while he was president, was at a fourth or fifth grade level with his vocabulary. The other thing he did is that he used all caps. Most of his posts are all caps. I study propaganda, there’s a chapter in my book about propaganda, and I also studied visual things. He’s a hugely visual person, and so at the beginning, he would capitalize only some words in his tweets. They were words that he knew when people were scrolling would stand out. Stuff about his victimhood, stuff about the horrible Democrats, stuff about him being so great, he would capitalize those things, and he would use this very basic language that appealed to people who wanted a politician who they feel is down to earth.
Anderson: When there are serious, credible threats of authoritarianism or fascism on the rise globally in a political climate, what are the most effective practices in curbing that rise?
Ben-Ghiat: So recently, we had a really good example in Poland. In 2023, the opposition mobilized to the polls and voted out a far-right government that had all but banned abortion nationally and was horribly anti-immigrant, which is the same checklist of far-right things that we are having here and all kinds of other places. So, what do they do? They expose the corruption of the far-right government and their hypocrisy. That is a little harder to do here because the GOP is highly organized with a very effective party machine for messaging. They also have Fox News, and there was no Fox News equivalent in Poland. But, they did expose the hypocrisy, showing that government politicians were actually selling visas to immigrants and profiting, gouging them. People didn’t like that. They also appealed to women about abortion rights and so and they had positive messaging.
They also had like a six party coalition. Now, we are really hindered with this because we’ve only got the two parties. We’re a giant nation, a big, powerful nation, and when one of those parties leaves democracy, doesn’t recognize election results anymore, and uses violence, what do you do? That’s hard, and that’s why we have Republicans endorsing Harris now. Hundreds and hundreds of prominent Republicans, people who served with Trump, and generals are coming out and saying things like, “For the good of the country,” and “Put country over party this time and keep him out,” because we know how dangerous it is for national security. So in Poland, the polls were able to get six parties representing a wide swath of opinions. They all unified against the far-right government.

The final thing they did was mobilize emotion. They had the March of a Million Hearts, and literally a heart as their logo. It was about positivity, solidarity, kindness, all of it was a values based campaign. Plus, the anti-corruption and pro-reproductive rights. It was the largest turnout since communism fell in 1989. Then that led to the largest voter turnout since 1989 and now they have progressives in power. Those are things that are much harder to do here, but that’s why when the Harris Walz campaign started talking about joy and love, I was like, “This is good, this is what we need.”
Anderson: Honestly, I do take a more moderate stance between the two, specifically when it comes to being on radio, but I do really enjoy the positivity that’s been coming from the Democratic Party since they’ve switched to having Vice President Harris be the primary candidate as opposed to Joe Biden. There is a massive tonal switch that I don’t think really anyone can deny. If you watched the DNC, it just seemed like there was a lot more positivity in the room than there has been in the last eight years that we’ve seen from the Democratic Party.
Ben-Ghiat: On that positive, moderate note, it’s really important to engage people on a positive basis and not just attack. It’s not by demonizing each other, it’s by actually reaching out to those you know. Bridge building is important, and a lot of people have family members or friends they don’t talk to anymore because of politics. You have to have those conversations. All the research says you should not shame them, you should not condescend them. You have to meet them where they are and keep the connection going, because otherwise we don’t have a civic fabric anymore, and that’s what can lead to political violence, and nobody wants that except a very small minority of extremists. Most Americans don’t want that.
In fact, on some of the major issues, Americans are much more moderate than MAGA. They are for reproductive rights. They are for same-sex marriage. Those things have been accepted. There’s a lot of repair we can do. That’s why I’m also on this tour talking about these things. It’s just we can all do things our own way and have our own contribution, because what is the alternative?