Ruth Ben-Ghiat

“You find yourself with a state that is transformed out of all recognition, but it’s still ‘democracy.'”

“I think we’re definitely living in a new era,” says Ben-Ghiat, author of Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema. “We’re also being fed a series of crisis narratives by the new right, which would like us to be in a new era where everything is decaying and they are the answer; they are the saviours.”

“We put all the blame on Trump but the GOP has seen in him a kind of vehicle to get certain radical things they want done and [to push] a certain cultural shift in the nation.”

“It took people by surprise – What Mussolini did, he came from the left, the revolutionary left. He was a socialist.”

“There’s a template for authoritarian rule….So far, [Trump is] checking a lot of the boxes.”

“If we rate Franco and Mussolini as ten on a scale of classic fascist demagogues, Trump might get seven.”