This is a WILD WITH SARAH WILSON conversation, investigating ideas and practices that can help build our new, life-generating future. We are in a liminal time, between an old world that is no longer holding and a new world - “the what comes next” - that’s yet to emerge. Now is the time to be imagining this future together. If this episode inspires you, please share it with loved ones.
Today’s guest is Ruth Ben-Ghiat historian of fascism and New York Times bestselling author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.
Ruth is an internationally recognised expert in how psychologically unstable men come to power and use corruption, sexual predation, staged victimhood and violence to rule. She’s recently, however, turned her focus to how societies subjected to such tyranny have survived and fought back…using moral authority. Which is what I’ll be talking about with her in today’ s episode – how to resist the current fascist creep and how to push through to the other morally recalibrated side, to that what comes next that I keep bringing up in this series.
This chat is oddly enlivening. Ruth makes the point that authoritarians eventually do themselves in. It’s called autocratic backfiring. She wrote recently:
“This is one reason resistance will continue to spread in the coming years. Dictatorships are not built to navigate a future in which survival of climate-change, disasters, resource scarcity, a shrinking labor force, and armed conflict will require fact-based communications, community, care, altruism, and other things such states work hard to suppress.”
Which begs, is resistance, to a large extent, about holding out, until the backfire invariably happens?
Ruth is one of a number of bold, grounded political commentators I follow online who talks the stuff we cover (technofascism, Project 2025 etc), but (bravely) through a political strategy lens. She appears on CNN, NPR, Katie Curic’s podcast, Politico, WIRED and more. It was an honour to get her thoughts on where we’re heading…
Got questions?
Ruth and I will answer questions and respond to your feedback in the comments section…don’t hesitate to hit us with curly ones.
About Ruth
Ruth is an American history professor at New York University and a political commentator with an expertise in fascism and authoritarian leaders. Her 2020 book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present was a global bestseller.
She publishes the hugely popular Substack Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy and will publish her next book, Resisting Autocracy: What History Teaches About Fighting Back, next year.
Shownotes
I encourage you to subscribe to Ruth’s Substack, Lucid.
You can catch up on the Ece Temelkuran episode I refer to here.
This episode with Lindsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt’s ideas on resistance might also interest you.
Remember, you can now watch us live on YouTube!
Sarah xx
