Strongmen: Trump / Modi / Erdoğan / Putin / Duterte

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THE MONSTERS have returned. They are led by strongmen—by Trump, by Modi, by Erdoğan, by Duterte, and by others. But these are not really strong men. These are men who pretend to be strong, who hide behind ugly rhetoric that befuddles the masses, but who are nothing other than cowardly when it comes to social reality. Rather than confront the difficult problems that face us—problems of unemployment and starvation, humiliation and inequality—they take refuge in an easy rhetoric of hate. It is so much easier to hate than to spend the time necessary to build the ramparts of a future world, one where the catastrophic social problems of today no longer define human existence. But the monsters of today—the morbid symptoms of this period of transition—do not care to tackle the problems of society. They blink at them, nod at them, and then move on to harsher prescriptions.

At first glance, these monsters appear to be like the fascists of the last century—Germany’s Adolph Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Spain’s Francisco Franco, and Japan’s Hideki Tojo as well as Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar, Romania’s Ion Antonescu, and South Africa’s D.F. Malan. These men and their regimes are defined by the ugliness of their political agendas as well as their rhetoric—bilious against social groups that they abhor. Violence is both their strategy and their tactic. The current monsters even resemble the monsters of the 1960s and the 1970s, the men who led the neo-fascist states through the military juntas (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Greece, Indonesia, and Thailand); these were weak states that used force to extract resources at low prices for export and to produce markets for high value imported goods—all at the behest of multinational corporations and imperial centers.

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