LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President-elect Trump has a number of big changes on his initial agenda. But aside from these policy goals, what can the country expect from a second Trump presidency? Some are looking to other world leaders that Trump admires for clues. Trump has praised Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un and, during the presidential debate, Hungary's authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban.
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DONALD TRUMP: One of the most respected men. They call him a strongman. He's a tough person. Smart.
FADEL: Now, Trump also flippantly said if elected, he'd be a dictator, but just for a day. And his own image as a strongman appeals to some of his voters - even those who find him otherwise unappealing and dishonest, according to exit polls. For more, we're joined by Jason Stanley. He's a philosopher and author at Yale and an expert on fascism. Good morning.
JASON STANLEY: Good morning.
FADEL: So what strongman qualities does Trump exhibit that seem to appeal to some of his voters?
STANLEY: Well, a strongman is someone who represents democracy as weak and ineffectual, presenting himself as the only one who can fix the nation's problem. And a fascist strongman, which - Trump sort of fits this mold, is someone who represents the nation's problems as centrally due to mass immigration, Marxists, feminists, LGBTQ citizens and progressives, who in this light are really Marxists.
FADEL: So, I mean, I think he might quibble with the idea that he fits that definition. But it's something, for example, his former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, has also said. What does the election of a strongman mean for democracy?
STANLEY: So democracy involves compromise, and so it can be represented as sort of a feminized system. The strongman offers this sense of efficiency. But it's all a fake promise, right? Because efficiency - loyalty, for a strongman, always wins over competence and efficiency, so loyalty is going to be the prime element in any strongman regime. And competence won't be rewarded. Competence is kind of irrelevant. What's relevant is loyalty. And so you're going to see crony capitalism on one side.
The billionaires who helped elect him will get their industries deregulated. They'll get state contracts, as we see in Hungary, where Viktor Orban's son-in-law gets all these state contracts. And Trump will reward the Christian theocrats, who massively supported him, with Christian theocratic policy. So what we're going to see is we're going to see crony capitalism with, you know, special favors for the super wealthy who supported him. And we're going to see favors doled out in terms of policy for the Christian nationalist far right.
FADEL: What do you think appealed to voters? I mean, in the end, a majority of voters in the U.S. chose to elect him, despite the antidemocratic things he said on the campaign trail. And, you know, a lot of voters we spoke to across the country kind of dismissed that stuff as rhetoric, saying, well, he's a guy who can solve a crisis. He's the guy that can solve the economy. What is it about this moment that had people drawn to him?
STANLEY: Well, democracy - this is a classical moment from the perspective of democratic political philosophy. It's almost scripted from the works of Plato. So democracy is a fundamentally fragile system. In itself, it's too abstract to be popular. It only works as long as it delivers for the people. And specifically, according to democratic political philosophers like Rousseau and even Aristotle, it only delivers as long as it keeps people essentially middle class and wealth inequality low. When there's really high wealth inequality and complete unfairness, it's easy to stir resentment against elites who are just sanguine about this system that clearly hasn't worked. And it's at that point that you can really stir people's resentments.
And classically, in the ancient world, a demagogue is someone who uses that situation of sort of profound unhappiness at the system - which one could say is justified in the United States today - to redirect the resentments against, in this case, the targets of fascism - feminists, Marxists, immigrants.
FADEL: Have American voters in the past been drawn to strongman personas, or is this something new?
STANLEY: Well, American voters have been drawn to one-party systems, as we can see from many Southern states that are locked in in a kind of gerrymandered, one-party system with so - the sort of legacy of Jim Crow. Jim Crow is what, in the Black intellectual tradition, counts as a paradigm case of fascism.
FADEL: Right.
STANLEY: But I think this kind of leader - what Trump gives is a more classically European fascist structure. And so that's what we're confronting today - a kind of cult of the leader buoyed by the failure of the system, the democratic capitalist system, to deliver results.
FADEL: Jason Stanley is a philosopher at Yale and the author of the recent book "Erasing History." Thank you so much for your time and for joining us today.
STANLEY: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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