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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

Oh my God, Ross, when was your birthday?

Yesterday.

Oh, happy birthday.

Happy birthday.

Thank you. Thank you. Sagittarius.

Yeah.

How old are you, Ross?

I am — my soul is eternal, but I’m 44.

Oh.

I think I’ve reached the age that I always was. I think I’m going to just stay here.

There you go.

I think this is my true age.

I believe that. You’re an old soul.

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From New York Times Opinion, I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Carlos Lozada.

And I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

All right. Today, I really want us to talk about strongmen, not so much of the physical variety, but of the political kind. Because of late, I’ve been thinking about this a lot as the Republican presidential primary heats up, and we’re looking at Donald Trump trying to make his return with an increasingly disturbing, dark authoritarian rhetoric.

But we also have, looking at this globally, Argentina’s new president, the far-right Libertarian, Javier Milei, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and both have been compared to Trump. So what I want to talk about is, for those of you who think about this more globally, why are we seeing this trend toward these kinds of leaders? What’s changed? And then, later on, we can get into what’s going to happen next or what we see down the pike, especially if Trump is reelected in 2024. But first, let’s clarify, who are we even talking about? Who do you think of when you hear the term strongman?

Well, we need — sorry, Ross. Go ahead.

No. Go, Carlos, go.

Well, I think we need to define more precisely what we mean by a strongman. Is it an attitude? Is it a set of policy positions? Is it just a style of politics? Trump is, not to be so obvious and so parochial, but he’s the caricature of the strongman leader, and the us-versus-them rhetoric, the them being immigrants, or the them being political elites.

Milei, who you mentioned, from Argentina, he’s a rabble rouser right winger. His us-versus-them rhetoric is less about immigrants than it is about the federal government of Argentina, which he wants to slice in half. What makes someone a quote, unquote, strongman, is something that I’m interested in. Because we throw the term around a lot as if we all agreed on what it was.

I think there’s a distinction here between style and substance, where what you have globally are rebellions against existing governments, existing constellations of elites that seem to take similar stylistic forms, even when the substance is quite different. So as you guys have just been saying, Milei is a kind of hyper-Libertarian, grown in a laboratory by Reason Magazine and the Ludwig von Mises Foundation.

In Alabama, of all places.

Right. In order to libertarianize Argentina, which itself has been governed by a populist Peronist formation for a long period of time. So that’s quite different from Trump running as an economic populist against the neoliberal elites, and also quite different from Geert Wilders running as mostly just a immigration is out of control, we need to do something about it candidate in the Netherlands. But you would not be mistaken to notice that all of them have very weird hair, step one.

That is the real definition of a strongman.

And all of them are playing, in different ways, with a politics of disruption, showmanship, absurdity that is — I don’t think the term authoritarian is right. I think some of them have authoritarian impulses and some don’t, and some it remains to be seen. I think it’s fair to say Trump has authoritarian impulses that Milei may not have. But all of them are rabble rousers with a kind of, we are against the system and we are manifesting this in a particularly male style.

There is, I think, a way in which a male braggadocio, this performative masculine rebellion against liberal politesse shows up again and again, from Silvio Berlusconi, to Trump. Even Boris Johnson had some of this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you get these misbehaving men with wild hair as particular avatars of populist rebellion.

Well, and they’re not all men, right? We have leaders like Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France. I think that what a lot of these leaders are promising is a past-oriented politics. It’s both a cult of personality that I alone can solve this problem, and also, that I am going to take us back to when things were good.

Obviously, “I alone” is a Trump line, and “Make America great again” is a Trump line. And that notion of, there was this glorious past in which more people had jobs, more people spoke the same language as you, more people looked like you, the economy was growing. That, I think, is, to me, what’s at the core of this appeal, is the sense of deep disappointment with modern life, and where we are right now, and a sense that something’s got to be done about it. They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore, and willing to throw the dice on people like Milei, who is, like, hey, let’s dollarize the economy. And, oh, by the way, I have cloned my dogs, which is, yeah, great.

See, now, when I think of strongman, I think more in terms of authoritarian impulses. They’re willing to use the tools of government to consolidate and expand their power, to think more along the lines of Viktor Orbán, the ultra right-wing prime minister of Hungary, or Donald Trump than I do just the performative machismo. Otherwise, then we get down into Robert F. Kennedy taking off his shirt to do push-ups on social media.

But Kennedy, I think Kennedy fits this. I think part of his success is that he fits into this category, too.

And it’s also just disruption for disruption’s sake, and a way to get attention, and to hack the current media landscape, I think, is having crazy hair. Milei was like, I won’t apologize for having a penis. I won’t apologize for being a man. And it’s interesting, because I feel like, in this country, the demographics of that politics is very different. But in Argentina, I think there’s been a huge groundswell of support for Milei among young people.

I don’t know about disruption for disruption’s sake. The style alone is not the appeal. There have to be a set of conditions that enable this kind of politics to not just exist, but to thrive. So you can look at outcomes. And you can look at ideas.

The outcomes, in recent years, have not been great. Look at Russia, where Putin does combine the stylistic, take my shirt off, ride horses, and fight judo style with the policy substance. Look at Russia, declining life expectancy, and growing poverty during the post-Soviet experiment made people think back to an era where someone strong was in charge.

The financial crisis, and not just in the United States, but in Europe, starting in 2008, broke the assumption that standard liberal democratic practices would make things work. And so you end up tying those struggles to the style of politics and the substantive politics of the quote, unquote, strongman, which is often fears of national decline, fears of immigrants. There has to be a substantive impulse to why this exists. It is not purely that we just are starting to dig the hair.

And coming back to the United States, you definitely see this with Trump. A lot of surveys and research has been done showing that there are a not insignificant number of Americans who increasingly say things like, the country is in so much trouble, we’re going to need a leader who is willing to bend the rules in order to save us, or at some point, the country is going to need people to take matters into their own hands. There is a sense of apocalyptic change that underlies a lot of what you see with the willingness to tolerate anti-democratic impulses in American leaders.

But wait, what is the anti? So I think we’re playing around with a lot of different terms here, right? I don’t think that most of these figures embody anti-democratic impulses.

I’m just talking about what we’re seeing in American voters and Trump.

OK. Well, then even in the United States, the whole success of Trump’s, basically, his plan to hold onto power within the Republican Party after losing re-election in 2020 was based on the idea that he could convince his supporters that he actually won the election, that there was no possible way that Joe Biden could have gotten so many more votes than Hillary Clinton. Therefore, the election was stolen, and so on. Now that is — it is an anti-democratic impulse in some way. But the people who hold it don’t think that they’re overthrowing democracy. They think they’re saving it.

Well, sure, I understand that.

That’s quite different from —

But what I’m talking about are all these surveys where people are more comfortable with a strong leader who is willing to do things, even if they’re meant to go after the press, use the Justice Department to go after the elites who are undermining him, buy into that whole deep-state stuff. You’re talking about a guy who did, whether or not it worked, encourage folks to take matters into their own hands, when we’re talking about overthrowing an election.

Yeah. And he’s made a lot of promises of things that he’s going to do if he’s elected next year, and so on, and so forth. We talked about the sort of conditions that created this moment. And I don’t know if you guys listened to it or have seen the book that’s now come out about it, but Rachel Maddow did this podcast last year called Ultra, and it was all about the 1930s, and the rise of anti-Semitism, and fascism, and lawmakers who were making speeches that were written by Nazi propagandists and then mailing them out to their constituents on the taxpayers’ dime.

And it’s sort of this forgotten episode. But what really strikes me about it is the organic conditions, the global economic and political conditions that led to that moment within the United States were the same sorts of conditions that led to Italy becoming a fascist country, or to Germany becoming a fascist country. None of those conditions, like the Great Depression, the ecological crisis in the United States, none of those are happening now.

We’ve had some tough times. We’ve been through a global pandemic. We’ve been through some hard things. But none of them, I think, come even close to mirroring what the state of the world was in the late 1920s and in the 1930s, when there was this flowering of affection for fascism.

Which makes it unsurprising that there is no evidence that you’re seeing a comparable flowering of affection for fascist dictatorship today, right? And part of the bullshit of what Maddow does is to pretend that America is actually on the brink of being tipped over into something that resembles a Nazi dictatorship, which is not, in fact, the case. And the reality of all of these figures is that they are further in — well, not every case, but in many cases, further to the right than right-wing politicians were 15 or 20 years ago.

This is not true on economic policy, but it’s true, let’s say, on issues related to immigration, especially, and I agree, on issues related to what a powerful president can and should do, issues related to norms of government. But that’s just really different than Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler being literal dictators of their country. Giorgia Meloni took —

We’ve shifted the semantics here. We’re not talking about fascism, we’re talking about what we’re seeing.

There’s a lot of —

Well, we were just talking —

Well, hold on. Let’s let Carlos, Carlos, Carlos. OK, you got it.

No, no, no. I’m just saying that there’s a lot of room between Mussolini, between a fascist dictatorship, and a thriving liberal democracy. To say that because we’re not a fascist dictatorship, to say that somehow we’re not eroding —

I don’t think we’re a thriving liberal democracy.

But Ross, I want to go back to something, Ross. You seem to minimize the anti-democratic inroads of a figure like Donald Trump. And you’re like, well, I guess convincing a bunch of people that he actually won the election, and that it was all rigged was, you said it’s anti-democratic in some way. It’s undermining the absolute, rock bottom, minimal definition of democracy, which is that it is a system that selects leaders through fair and competitive elections. And so that is a frontal assault on liberal democracy. It’s not Mussolini, but it’s —

I don’t agree.

If you are saying that elections are only fair and proper when you win, you have given up on democracy. So it’s not just some weird affectation. And, in fact, there’s nothing else that really animates his coming campaign, nothing else beyond litigating those battles.

Well, what do you mean by —

Well, keeping himself out of prison.

Again, litigating those battles involves Trump making —

What’s his policy platform? It’s about 2020. So —

Right, it’s about Donald Trump arguing to the public that he actually won the 2020 election, which is nonsense.

Well, of course, it’s nonsense.

But is nonsense within a context where he’s saying to his supporters, I won the most votes and the Democrats stole it from me, which I’m saying is different from, say, the views of large numbers of people on the German right in circa 1930. Not the Nazis, but the people who helped the Nazis take power. The view of those people was that democracy was bad and should be replaced. And they said so explicitly. That is not the argument.

And there is a continuum here right, where if the claim you’re making is that someone’s election is not legitimate is a frontal assault on American democracy, then, I’m sorry, but by your definition, Rachel Maddow’s entire Russiagate conspiracy hysteria represented a frontal assault on American democracy. Because its entire argument was that —

Rachel Maddow is not the frontrunner of a major party to be president. She’s the frontrunner of MSNBC.

Donald Trump is a more serious problem for American democracy than Rachel Maddow. I completely agree. But if the argument is, is Donald Trump a figure who is part of a turn away from democracy in American life? I don’t think that’s quite the right way to understand him.

But democracy’s turn by electing people, you vote in people who then take away your democracy. This is a thing that happens over, and over, and over again. Viktor Orban is an elected leader. Vladimir Putin, for that matter, is an elected leader.

But slowly, over time, the people who are allowed to compete in elections against you become fewer and fewer. You find ways using lawfare to limit who your opponents can be. We just saw this in Turkey, right? There was an election there where the most plausible candidate was barred from running, essentially, because they had a Trumped-up political charge.

Yes, it would be terrible if one political party wanted to bar the most plausible candidate of the other political party from running for president. That would really be a big threat to democracy, wouldn’t it?

Using the procedure of impeachment, which is in the Constitution as the way in which we deal with these questions?

That’s not that’s not what I’m referencing. How about using the procedure of a very recondite interpretation of post-Civil War constitutional amendments to argue that Donald Trump is —

There’s nobody buying that argument, Ross.

So I think part of the problem here, Ross, is that the way you are presenting it, it is just as though you are suggesting that Donald Trump took to the airwaves to convince people with his rhetoric, or his logic, or whatever that he had actually won that election. That is not the extent of it. He didn’t just say it. He used the tools of government. He was trying to replace people in the Justice Department.

What Trump did was really bad, I agree. It was really bad

All of these things, it’s not just rhetoric. He used the tools of government, which is classic, classic abuse of power, to try and put forward an alternative reality.

What I’m saying is that the argument that Trump put forward was an argument to persuade his supporters that they were defending the sanctity of American democracy. And that was bad, and wicked, and had terrible results.

I think you raise a really good point, Ross, when you say that the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 think that they’re saving democracy. They don’t think that they’re to undermine it. And that’s the way it is in the United States, always.

People whose actions one can look at and think are undermining the system almost always couch those actions in a perhaps sincere belief that they are, in fact, rescuing it. People who want to secede from the Union say that they’re doing so to uphold its greatest principles. It’s the fundamental battle of America.

And you have different sides who look at that battle and think that the other side is destroying the nation. They’re striving to preserve. Everyone thinks they’re saving it. Everyone always thinks they’re saving it. Now in the case that you just described, they thought they were saving it because they had been lied to. But, of course, of course they thought they were saving it.

This seems like a good point to take a break. And when we come back, we’re going to talk about where all this could be headed, especially if we’re looking at another Trump presidency in 2024.

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And we’re back. So we were talking about Trump and the justifications people might use for what most of us see as his anti-democratic behavior. But I think there’s a larger question here about the fate of liberal democracy, especially if we’re looking at another Trump presidency. Are we seeing a global embrace of a different kind of politics? And if so, what does that mean for the US? Ross, you have thoughts.

If you look at what is happening in Europe right now, what you’re already seeing is a normalization of populist critiques of the liberal consensus as the new normal form of opposition politics, which, in most places, will cease to be interpreted as a kind of existential threat to democracy itself, and will be understood more as politics as usual. For instance, you’ve just seen, in Poland, an election that turned the Populist Party out of power, and returned the kind of center to power. What you see in Italy with Meloni has been a candidate with roots in Italy’s fascist movements becoming prime minister and ending up operating within........

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