The End Of The Story

Abridged Transcript, On Point (my favorite Public Radio Show)
Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Ruth Ben-Ghiat is back with us today. She’s a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. She writes a Substack newsletter on threats to democracy called Lucid, and she’s author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. And throughout this year, she has spoken frequently and eloquently on the threats to democracy posed in the 2024 presidential elections.

So we were talking about the silence in that MSNBC clip.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s right.

BEN-GHIAT: And I felt this awkwardness as though I’d said something that I have said before, including on that show, but now that the election had happened, and Mr. Trump would be coming into office. It was as though the reality of what he had accomplished hit home. And this theme that he has, it’s very easy to dismiss him as full of bombast, as a clown, and he makes himself clownish on purpose at his rallies, and he seems disorganized. And often having cognitive problems.

But he has accomplished a kind of mass conditioning to see democracy as failing and see strongmen rule as something that emotionally, socially, can offer people what democracy could not. And so I was remarking on this, and it was like it hit home for all of us, and that’s why the silence occurred.

CHAKRABARTI: So you’re saying that 77-ish million people have been conditioned to believe that democracy is failing? Is it possible that those conditions, let me use conditioning in another word, that the conditions of democracy were in fact letting a lot of people down prior to Trump’s reelection, let alone his first election?

BEN-GHIAT: So many people who voted for the Trump-Vance ticket would not agree with this. They would say, I want cheaper eggs. I want cheaper gas. I voted because of my real-life, everyday conditions. But it is remarkable that with the enormous help of Fox News and other far right media outlets, they were led to believe that the economy, the source of pricing and their real wages, etc., was failing, when we were in a huge boom.

And the Biden-Harris administration created record breaking numbers of jobs. But propaganda is not only filling the airwaves with lies and myths, truths, and half-truths. It’s also about concealing. And so people have been, if you’re in that ecosystem of the media, you have not heard the success stories, or if you hear them, you don’t believe them.

And so that’s also part of the conditioning. So I’m not, I don’t want to make this overly simplistic, because that would be an insult to the people who voted for Mr. Trump, who are many types of people. And this was a shock, simplistic models that Latinos shouldn’t be voting for Trump. That doesn’t work.

And so that’s part of the shock of this election. That that ticket filled with open racism and misogyny appealed to so many people, and the task is to unpack why. And that’s historically what my work has done. To look at what are the moments in history when these demagogues appeal to people, including people who we might not think would have a benefit from supporting them.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let’s dive into that in much more detail, because what do you think are, give me a little bit more about what one of some of the moments were and the conditions of those moments in the past. I know obviously you’re one of the experts on Mussolini. If we could go to that, are there any lessons to draw there about what was happening in Italy just prior to Mussolini’s power?

BEN-GHIAT: It’s really, Mussolini was just the first instance of this pattern. And my book, Strongmen, goes over a hundred years. And it was very fascinating to see these patterns recurring in the most disparate nations. And it’s when societies are perceived to have been, had a huge amount of disruption and social progress. When traditional parties and systems, including democracy as it exists, wherever it is in the world, at that time, no longer seem to meet the needs of the moment.

And in particular, when there have been gains in workers’ rights, In gender equality, and in racial equality or emancipation. Those are the times when the strongmen comes up and Mussolini called fascism a revolution of reaction. And that’s very important even to understanding America today. You disrupt everything.

You cause chaos. You throw everything up in the air. And then you have your counter revolution, which is what fascism was, where you take rights away, you send women out of the workforce, you reverse progress that’s been made. And that’s what happened, of course, in Italy and in Germany after World War I, which was an enormous cataclysm.

But also, Spain, 1930s, before the Franco and the Civil War. You had a government in the early ’30s in Spain that gave women unprecedented rights of inheritance, voting, all these things that left some people in the Euro-American context, it’s white males, feeling like they were losing authority, they were losing prestige.

And so that built support for authoritarian solutions. And so what’s fascinating is whether it’s an election or it’s actually a coup, because people don’t know there’s going to be a coup, then that’s the nature of coups, but you actually have to build support for a different system.

Something has to happen to reverse this terrible progress, which is making me lose out. And so that’s the pattern. And we were well suited for that from the very beginning. 2016 onward.

CHAKRABARTI: So let me ask you, there’s so much for us to peel back. Does all of that still apply for the United States, specific?

And I asked this specifically, because the U.S., I would say, is a little bit different than post-World War I Germany or Italy in that we, this is a country with the world’s largest economy. It is, by definition, a diverse democracy, and it’s not just exclusively white men who voted for Trump.

If that were the case, then he would not have won. It’s that he did form quite an interesting coalition of people who don’t necessarily fall into that aggrieved socially disrupted white male category. And I think that’s different, is it not, from what was happening in Italy and Germany and the examples that you gave?

BEN-GHIAT: It is, because the nature of our society is far more complex. We’re a multi faith, multi racial society. However, the principle that the most successful strongmen have often been people who have a background in mass communications or marketing, and they make themselves into the everyman.

They’re the everyman, the man of the people, and they’re also the man above all other men. That’s the personality cult principle, but they will be whatever you need them to be. And in the morning, Mussolini or Berlusconi would say, X to this group. And in the afternoon, they would say the opposite to another group.

And the strongman becomes the kind of glue holding these disparate constituencies together. And so you see, from Mussolini onward, they have the most eclectic base of followers. They have housewives, they have gangsters, they have priests, they have people who maybe don’t have anything in common. And from one perspective, a democratic perspective, you’d say, why are these people supporting him?

He’s taking their rights away. This is where the personality cult comes in. They are the man of destiny. They are the man who can solve the problems. I alone can fix it.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Ben-Ghiat, just out of curiosity, I played that MSNBC clip at the top of the show.

It occurs to me, though, that the folks watching MSNBC, and I suppose you could even argue listening to this show right now, may be predisposed to nodding in agreement about their concerns regarding a Trump presidency. Have you ever been invited by, I don’t know, places like Fox News, to speak?

BEN-GHIAT: No, and I would go on, probably. Because it’s really, if we’re going to restore a sense of trust and bridge build, there’s a huge movement in our country of bridge building. There’s all these organizations, nobody hears about them. We’ve got to get out of our silos and speak to those who made a different choice, and understand them.

And one of the things I’m very big on is having conversations, which is something that we all can do. Most people in America now have a relative or a community member, a beloved friend who has, perhaps, is living, I say, dwelling in the disinformation tunnel. And there’s tons of research about this, both from the point of view of authoritarian cults and also disinformation, and even people who have been victims of fraud.

There’s a lot of it and it all comes to the same conclusion that you’ve got to have frank conversations that are not condescending. Because these people, if they begin to feel that they’ve been lied to or conned in some way, they feel very shamed. They don’t want to be shamed.

And so they can go back further and retrench, when they’re just beginning to realize that perhaps things are not as they seemed to them. And so we have to use love and kindness and understanding. And these are things we can do at the individual level, at the community level. There’s really a lot of potential for faith leaders who have very disparate congregations.

That’s very important to do. That will be very important in the future. So I would gladly speak to all kinds of groups, all kinds of venues, because I believe that’s in the best interest of our country right now.

CHAKRABARTI: I keep thinking about, I’m just looking at the latest numbers here.

It’s 76.9 million votes for president-elect Trump. And I would say, some of them directly voted for him because they want an authoritarian, they want a strongman as president, but a lot of them didn’t. And the way that our electoral college system works, we’re really talking about a couple hundred thousand people who flip either way, Democratic or Republican, depending on who the candidates are and what the issues in that election is.

And I don’t think that they’re necessarily voting for, actively, for a strong man. And so it makes me wonder, what was missing in the conversation throughout 2024, when people, and I’m not pinning this on you, Professor Ben-Ghiat, but when people repeatedly raise their concerns about Donald Trump’s authoritarian leanings, full disclosure, I’m going to be perfectly honest, we did a ton of shows about it on this program. I stand by every one of them, but something about that didn’t break through.

And to that point, I want to just play a moment from a conversation we had with Sarah Longwell. She’s executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump. She’s a founder and publisher of the Bulwark, and she’s been running these near constant focus groups with voters for quite some time. And she told us about what she heard from voters about why they think Trump won this time around.

SARAH LONGWELL: Every incumbent post-pandemic has been thrown out by the voters, because people are mad about high prices. And in a big general election when a lot of low propensity voters who didn’t really hear her message. Didn’t even really hear his, they weren’t engaged.

Like, how do they deal with the fact that Trump is a convicted felon? It’s not that they don’t know it. It’s just they don’t, it’s not high salience to them. It’s not important to them. They just, it floated by them at some point, which is part of this information environment issue, is they’re not digging deep on a lot of this stuff.

They’re just like, I don’t know. I think maybe he’s going to be better on this. They don’t, man, I’ll tell you, I have, you go into a focus group, and you say, do you think Donald Trump’s an authoritarian? The number one thing that people say back to you is. What’s an authoritarian?

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Ben-Ghiat, respond to that.

BEN-GHIAT: On the one hand, this speaks to what we said before, that we have not done a good enough job of civic education. One of the biggest tragedies of authoritarian rule, no matter how the people, the demagogues get to power, is that they encourage people to act and vote against their own interests.

And only later do people realize that Mussolini was not really making the trains run on time, that he and all his inheritors did not really care about the people. And they don’t listen to, when they’re in this mode. They’re also not listening to what their own object of love is telling them.

As when Trump, many times, most notably, most openly during the Iowa caucus, he told them, his most devoted, that he didn’t care if they lived or died, he said this many times. And so at the Iowa caucus, it was subzero temperatures, and he told people, please come out and caucus and support me.

And he said, if you vote and then you pass away, it will be worth it. Who is it worth it to? Not them, not their families, to him, because authoritarians have a strictly use and discard philosophy of life. It’s very bleak. And so they’re not listening to, their filtering out, because it’s upsetting to think that the person you spend so much time being devoted to doesn’t care about you. So that’s part of the problem.

The other issue, I would say, this very striking work that Sarah does, where people don’t really care if Mr. Trump is a convicted felon, and this leads to larger issues, when we have these nominations for cabinet posts and people have a boatload of legal trouble or conduct, personal conduct issues.

There has been, this goes back to the conditioning, a massive campaign, concerted campaign, to de-legitimize democratic authorities and institutions. And it has gone on for 10 years now. All of our institutions with law enforcement, think about the FBI, the deep state and January 6th was very important at breaking taboos, where nobody’s off limits for physical violence.

Trump shared a picture of Biden and then Harris, when Harris became the candidate tied up, as though they’d been the victim of a coup. It was a decal on the back of a pickup truck, and life size, very important. So there’s been this massive de-legitimation of authority. And when you have skewed people to think that the whole legal system is rigged, elections are rigged.

Certainly, the DOJ is just rigged. Then the idea that somebody is a convicted felon lands differently. It’s not a big deal, because none of it, these people aren’t serious. They’re just partisan hacks.

CHAKRABARTI: So can I go back to something you said a little earlier about authoritarians convince people to act or vote against their own interests?

Look, Democrats and the Democratic Party would say they have been screaming this for, I don’t know, 40 years, saying that is what, perhaps the greatest success of the Republican Party has been. But we haven’t used this phrase authoritarian until Trump came around. So is the difference the sort of cult of personality that you’re talking about?

BEN-GHIAT: Often it is, because when people are feeling uncertain and in distress and insecure economically, perhaps, or socially, and again, that goes back to people feel that they are being surpassed by others. Then then they will gravitate to somebody who can solve their problems. It’s a deep, recurring, it’s about a part of being human, gravitating to someone who can relieve you of the burden of choice, too, who will decide for you.

And Trump has been very skillful, even with that, when he gave that speech to evangelical Christians, who are one of his biggest voting blocs, and he said, my dear Christians, you’ll never have to vote again after this election, that appeals to people. I have quotes in my book with people from all over the world who are very happy to let the strongmen decide, because he knows best, and he will solve their everyday problems.

And this is, the other issue though, is that there’s a disaffection all over the world with democracy right now. And so incumbents, not just here, but incumbents were voted out.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So let me just push on that a little bit, because you’re exactly right.

Global discontent with democracy is rising. And I refuse to believe that’s because 8 billion people are stupid. It cannot be the case. Something isn’t working that’s making those systems internally weak. Something is failing. And I would say, in the United States, I’m less interested in trying to have great empathy, but I think I understand the values and motivations of people who go to Trump rallies, the evangelical Christians who have sworn their fealty to him despite his clear behaviors and oppositions to what their values should be.

Those folks are very transparent in terms of their beliefs, and what they want. I’m more interested in the people who voted for Trump this time around who are in the camp of Sarah Longwell, when she says a lot of people just say, I don’t even know what an authoritarian is. And here’s why.

It’s because I don’t think it’s just the people who feel that they’re being socially eclipsed that are attracted to what Donald Trump says he offers, there’s something unique about America, and that is this sense of precariousness isn’t just a white male issue, because I think a lot of Americans fully believe in what is supposed to be one of the most important central promises of this country, which is your children’s lives are going to be better than yours.

And there are Americans from across the spectrum right now who feel that their children’s lives will not be better than theirs. And that sense of deep fragility, whether it’s social or economic or something else, does lend itself to seeking out someone who isn’t the incumbent, or not the incumbent party, and who says, look, I get it.

Things are bad. I will fix it. I alone, as you’ve said. And I think that sense of uncertainty in the future, regardless of what your skin color is, or your ethnicity is, in this country, is a key factor.

BEN-GHIAT: Yes, it is. And you’ve raised a lot of important points. When we feel uncertain, we can respond in different ways.

We can retrench and be filled with hatred toward others who may be surpassing us, or we can have solidarity. We can have kindness. We can have community action, mutual aid. And Kamala Harris did a good job. It was just, she wasn’t there for long enough in preaching those values. That’s the hope and the joy, the togetherness, the solidarity, because those are two different reactions to feeling endangered in some way.

CHAKRABARTI: She also stopped talking about that in the last month before Election day. There’s a lot of, I was looking this weekend at analysis that around early October, that message faded away, and she started talking about Trump as a threat to democracy a lot more, and that didn’t break through.

Yeah, go ahead.

BEN-GHIAT: No, that was unfortunate. And this was when it started to come out, that important national security and military leaders were calling Trump a fascist. General Milley, then General Kelly and Mark Esper and others. And so she was asked, Do you agree with this?

And she didn’t. She said, I agree. And so this fascism, the maximum height of this discourse about Trump is a threat, dominated the very end of the campaign. And that was not fruitful. And I myself rarely call Trump a fascist. I use the word authoritarian, and we can get into why that is.

But because people —

CHAKRABARTI: Let me just jump in, because the other thing, and forgive me, professor, but the other thing that the Vice President Harris did is she started campaigning with the Cheney’s, for example, and for a lot of people who don’t like Trump, they may hate the Cheney’s more. And what they saw was a Democratic candidate embracing the status quo, which is what they wanted to get away from.

I’m raising these points, not to counter what you’re saying, but to ask you, if the rise of an authoritarian, does that not also require the weakness of an opposition party? And I think that the Harris campaign showed some weaknesses.

BEN-GHIAT: Yeah. So on the one hand, we are very unusual in the world with our rigid bipartisan system, and it means that when there’s a threat, or a party becomes an autocratic entity open to violence, like the GOP, which in 2022 endorsed January 6th as, quote, legitimate political discourse.

And so endorse change through force, or the whole fascist authoritarian thing. It means that those who don’t espouse this have nowhere to go. And that’s very different than other countries. So it wasn’t wrong that Harris kept, she said, there’s a space for you here, and it’s also important that 1,039, whatever the exact number was, of very important national security leaders came out for Harris and they stood with her, some of these people, because Trump is a danger to national security.

And so that wasn’t wrong. It’s just, it shouldn’t have been the only message, because what we really, to bring together a couple of threads, democracy has been seen as insufficient, as dispiriting, because it has led to gross inequality. Now the irony, the sad thing, going back to voting against your own interests, they have voted for someone who’s bringing in a billionaire, and to have a Department of Government Efficiency to slash their benefits, and has promised mass hardship, right?

They have voted for people who are backed by billionaires who have funneled dark money into politics. They’re not interested in the welfare of the ordinary person.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Let me just be more exact in some of the things that I quoted in the previous segment, Professor Ben-Ghiat, it was indeed Elon Musk who talked about a period of enforced austerity, if he and Donald Trump succeed in the cuts that they wish to make to the federal government. But he said specifically, quote, we have to reduce spending to live within our means. And that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long term prosperity. That’s what Musk said.

Okay, so Professor, I want to just play a couple of clips from voters themselves about why they voted for Trump. This is a Beau Hancock. He’s a student at Washington and Lee University, and he talked to PBS News.

BEAU HANCOCK: Being male and white in recent years, we’ve been told that we’re the problem in society and we’re always the ones causing issues.

Everything that’s going bad, everyone that’s oppressed, quote-unquote, is being oppressed by white men. And DEI and all these things that are meant to lower the amount of white men in any sphere are things that Trump ran on. I would say that the election points to the fact that we’re not as divided as we might have thought.

That it’s not about identity politics. It’s not about, I’m sure millions of Americans who voted for Trump don’t like him as a person, but it shows that we have things in common. We have beliefs in common. We want legal immigration. We want a good economy. We don’t care that he might say some off color things.

We don’t care if he has a mean tweet.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Beau Hancock. He’s a student at Washington and Lee University. Here’s one more. This is Jorge Rivas. He owns Sammy’s Mexican Grill near Tucson, Arizona. And he spoke to CNN about what he’d tell people who asked him why he voted for Trump.

JORGE RIVAS: I will tell him that the man love this country.

I know he’s not perfect. I know he’s not like the pope. We believe in teaching our kids about God, our Christian values, family values and the Democratic Party is embracing all the woke, left leaning ideas that doesn’t go with our values.

INTERVIEWER: I think there’s gonna be a lot of people who have a hard time hearing you say, I like Trump because of family values.

RIVAS: I don’t go by his lifestyle. I don’t go by what he has done.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it’s the Democrats pushing Latinos to Trump or is it Trump bringing in Latinos?

RIVAS: I think more Democrats are pushing Latinos to Trump.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Ben-Ghiat, before we talk about the President-elect’s new cabinet, I was wondering if you wanted to respond to either of those clips.

BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, it’s very interesting. Thank you for playing those, Jorge, the clip, the second clip, particularly interesting. Because he started by saying that Trump loves his country and is on the side of faith in God. And so of course Trump is one of the more impious people on the planet.

But when this was pointed out, said that it’s not about his personal life, it’s what he’s done for these causes. And that is actually accurate in terms of authoritarian history, past and present, because they make these, they’re called authoritarian bargains. And one of the most important is with faith institutions.

And so Mussolini, who was an atheist, it’s hard to find somebody who hated the Catholic church more than Mussolini, but he was the one who allied with the Vatican an authoritarian institution in Italy for its political actions. To create the Lateran Accord, solve the problem of church and state in Italy.

And he was praised as the man of destiny. It worked very well. So he delivered, and Trump has delivered for evangelicals. And so on that count, this was a very good clip to show that it can seem as though somebody is deeply misinformed to be talking about Trump as an agent of God. And yet the results, these are transactional people, the Trumps of the world, and past and present.

And he has delivered for evangelicals. And he has delivered for conservative family values. They’ve been hugely empowered, all these causes. So it’s not wrong. What he is saying, because he differentiated between the man’s personal life and what he has accomplished.

CHAKRABARTI: So let’s talk then more about what president-elect Trump may accomplish in his next presidency.

He’s putting, making announcements of the folks he wants on his cabinet. And I want to focus on his most recent one, and that is Kash Patel as director, the next director of the FBI. Now Patel is a pretty interesting guy, right? Because he’s written a book called Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for our Democracy.

And he calls for the illumination of the deep state, which is a term that he says includes elected leaders, journalists, big tech tycoons, members of the unelected bureaucracy, calls for a comprehensive house cleaning of the Justice Department. He’s a major critic of the FBI. Back in September, he called for the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. to be turned into a museum of the deep state. I could go on. Last year, in fact, almost exactly a year ago, he was on Steve Bannon’s show, and he promised that if Trump were really reelected, quote, we will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media, we are going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.

And now this self-proclaimed enemy of the deep state is poised to become an unelected bureaucrat heading the FBI. I’m just wondering, how does this fit into the people that other authoritarians have surrounded themselves with in your scholarship.

BEN-GHIAT: Meghna, you forgot that he authored a children’s book that is a fable about him as a warrior who defeats the evil Queen Hillary and saves King Donald.

He is not the hero of his children’s book. It’s King Donald. So —

CHAKRABARTI: I also didn’t mention that on January 6th, he was in the Pentagon, right? He had just been put there when Donald Trump had removed the secretary of defense and put in the acting secretary, and he was there. And what was part of the, I think, mass confusion is a very generous way of putting it.

Of one of the reasons why more national guardsmen and women were not called up to defend the Capitol, but that’s for another conversation, but continue. I think it’s this profound. You have said this earlier, that authoritarians promise to dismantle the very government that they come into control of. And this is a key part of what authoritarian bargains are, and it seems like Kash Patel is the perfect example of that.

BEN-GHIAT: Yes, I do. I have to just get it since I’m teaching a class on coups right now. I have to get in one thing, where one of the principles of coups is in a coup, some must act, and others must stand down. And that would be the reinforcements for the Capitol police, must stand down. Anyway. One of the things that authoritarians have done all over the world is it’s called hollowing out institutions, making institutions lose their democratic functions.

And void them of all democratic values, and actually destroy them as democratic organs of governance. But the hollowing out is important, because what values does Kash Patel stand for? He stands for opposition to truth, throwing away procedure, turning fact-based intelligence into emotional vengeance crusades.

He stands for loyalty to the leader, King Donald and being willing to do anything, no matter if it’s not legal, to help him in his goals. And that is the main, if you think about all the various and sundry people who have been nominated, that is what they have in common. And we’re hearing so many analyses that talk about them as absolutely not qualified, even on a personal conduct level.

If you flip it, and I live in, I don’t live personally in the authoritarian world, but they are ideally qualified, not for a democracy. They’re ideally qualified to lead the institutions of an authoritarian society. In which, again, vengeance, zealotry, politicizing every institution, which is the Project 2025 goal.

They’ve already got their vetted people ready to act on day one. And purge anybody who’s not politicized, who has a loyalty to their job, to professionalism, to the Constitution. That doesn’t go in an authoritarian society.

CHAKRABARTI: But see, folks like Patel, he’s been so just clear about this. He says he’s the patriot.

He’s the one who loves his country more than Journalists, unelected government officials, what have you. They’re not, he and folks like him are not saying, Oh no, we’re not loyal to America, we’re loyal to Trump. They’re claiming that their actions, in fact, are in the best interest of this country, and that is by definition the demonstration of their patriotism, and anyone else who does not feel or behave in that way is the un-American patriot, anti-patriot.

BEN-GHIAT: Yes, and that makes perfect sense in an authoritarian context. Because one of the things is that authoritarianism replaces rule of law, with rule by the lawless. And who is a criminal and who is a patriot undergoes a profound transformation. One of the reasons that authoritarians use pardons as soon as they get to power, like I’ll give you two examples, Mussolini, he declared a dictatorship after being prime minister of a democracy.

And the first thing he did was to pardon all the political criminals who had helped him get to power since the days of squadrism. So all the thugs, all the killers, all the lawyers who transgressed, they all got pardons. And Pinochet, after the coup in Chile, did the same thing. And it’s very interesting.

He pardoned not only everybody who had human rights abuses for torturing people, but he also pardoned concealers of the abuses who had wiped the military records clean of the abuse allegations. So you have to free up criminals, liars, propagandists to serve the party and serve the government. And so in this sense, so that’s where we have the, we will see, probably the pardoning of all the January 6th criminals.

And they will become patriots, and they’ve already become patriots in Trump’s campaign. There’s a January 6th prison choir and that sacralizes violence. This is very similar to early fascism, actually, I don’t want to, I’m not trying to label it fascist. It’s just very early, very similar to the sanctification of violence and law breaking, which becomes patriotism in the new order.

CHAKRABARTI: We have a few minutes left, Professor Ben-Ghiat, and I keep coming back to the fact that electorally, this is still a functioning democracy, right? All the things, is that a smirk as in no? Or yes?

BEN-GHIAT: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, it is. Okay, good. But because, all of the things that you say Trump accomplished, true, but people did vote for him of their own free will.

So for those folks, I’m wondering, what do you say to them now about what they can anticipate for their near future, for the future of their country? Why should they care about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions or leanings? I think, again, there are millions and millions of Americans that they don’t even, A, know what authoritarianism is or B, if they don’t care.

What would you say to make them, or to encourage them to care?

BEN-GHIAT: That even if they feel democracy is, they don’t care about it, people do care about community values, about decency. And they’re going to see that what it means to have institutions profoundly become uncaring, when their social security benefits may be slashed.

When the U.S. military, which is one of the most powerful and professional militaries in the world, is supposed to be doing domestic operations, domestic repression. And if it’s not just carting away undocumented immigrants, and by the way, we have normalized so many things. When they talk about 15 million people, or even if some of, the low, lower ball is 10 million people.

This is like emptying out the populations of entire countries like Sweden or Bolivia or Indonesia. This is on the scale of old school dictators. This level of math, it’s population re-engineering. And if the military is involved with that, as well as repressing protesters, which is what some Trump officials would like, as well.

That’s a profound everyday change to American society, and we will see how people feel about that.

CHAKRABARTI: Many people will either not experience that change directly, or if they do, if they see it in their communities, it is what they voted for.

BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, I have a quote in my book by a woman who lived under Pinochet’s dictatorship and after it ended, she told a journalist, Pinochet was great. I never saw anybody killed.

CHAKRABARTI: Doesn’t that explain that? You put that in your book, because it explains a lot, right? If that’s how people, if that is what drives people’s engagement with the world and what they believe about their world, then what would it take? What does it, is Chile a good example of what it takes to turn a country around, away from authoritarianism?

BEN-GHIAT: Yeah. Yes. Chile is very relevant for us today. But the hopeful part is that Chile is one of the only examples in the world where it’s not. They had a mass nonviolent protest movement, and they got rid of their dictator legally by an election and he left. Today that doesn’t work as well, as we see in Venezuela and elsewhere.

That’s the new playbook helped by Trump. That you, if the election doesn’t come out the way you like it, you just say that it was rigged, but Chile has many lessons for us today. I wrote a piece for The Atlantic on this, what Chile did, and I’m going to refer to it many times in the months to come.

This program aired on December 2, 2024.

“They have voted for people who are backed by billionaires who have funneled dark money into politics. They’re not interested in the welfare of the ordinary person.”

And that was The End Of America.