Notable Quotable: A Bargain With The Devil

Today’s Notable Quotable is from Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about the threats to democracies around the world. Her latest book, a New York Times bestseller, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, looks at how “illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, violence, and machismo” to construct alternate realities. She predicted that if Trump lost the 2020 election, he would not go quietly.

The following quote was in response to Mark Zuckerberg donating one million dollars to Donald Trump’s inaugural event and now flip-flopping on Facebook’s community standards to usher in a triumphant new era of sickening vulgarities and lies.

“It’s always been like this with autocrats making these kinds of bargains with the richest industry titans. Authoritarianism is about taking away rights for the many but giving the very few more liberties. And that’s where deregulation comes in, it’s where privatization comes in. That’s very important to authoritarianism all over the world, that the rich grow richer, with the foundation of neo-liberal economics practiced in Chile during Pinoche’s dictatorship, and so people feel that it’s a free for all where they’re going to be able to cash out and plunder the economy, plunder the workforce because the regulations won’t be there, and that evidently appeals to Bezos and Zuckerberg, and all the others who are lining up to kiss Trump’s ring.

—Ruth Ben-Ghiat

You can learn more about Ruth Ben-Ghiat and her books here.