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Trump is not fit to serve as leader... of American democracy, but he is... eminently fit to serve as the leader of an authoritarian state.

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat

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Democracy

More quotes by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Strong men disappear people, but they also disappear knowledge that conflicts with their ideologies and goals.

Authoritarians always tell you what they're going to do to you... [T]his is part of their politics of threat.

Instead of the obliteration that could come through climate change, you deny it and have a different kind of existential threat... affecting the white male minority, and you harness that rage.

Trump's repeated elevation of dictators as models of leadership should be understood as part of a re-education strategy: conditioning Americans to see authoritarianism as a superior form of government to democracy.

They strike... the "authoritarian bargain"..: prosperity for... the elites in return for loyalty and toleration of... violence and suspension of rights.

All Ruth Ben-Ghiat quotes →

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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally.

Oliver Cox Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

Gustave Flaubert

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ruth Ben-Ghiat (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.