Nearly 40 years ago I stood in a factory parking lot in South Milwaukee, listening to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan address a crowd. Religious radicals in Iran held 52 Americans hostage, and the nation was frustrated and angry thanks in part to a TV show titled: “The Hostage Crisis,” which covered the story daily, even when there was no news.
Reagan was going to get tough on the terrorists. He also was going to get tough on the Soviet Union. And he was going to get tough on a fictionalized welfare queen in Chicago. In the factory parking lot, he didn’t say that he was going to get tough on unions, but after he was elected, he did that too, firing 11,000 air-traffic controllers who had the temerity to strike.
Reagan didn’t actually get tough on terrorists. He negotiated with them twice during his presidency. And he didn’t need to get tough on the Soviet Union, though he is erroneously credited with precipitating its collapse. The USSR already was collapsing internally from the triple forces of political corruption, economic stagnation and a foreign policy that was bankrupting its treasury.
Reagan cast himself as a strongman and radicalized the Republican Party, embracing extremist views on abortion, social welfare programs and the military with an amiable and grandfatherly countenance, a public relations trick one writer described as wrapping pure evil in bright foil and selling it to the nation as a bon-bon.
In fact, as president, Reagan mostly got tough on working Americans, breaking unions and stripping away job-training, federal municipal assistance and other programs that served as a bridge to the middle class. Many of the nation’s woes originated with Reagan, who successfully cast himself as a strongman doing hard work.
To many Americans, the nation was “standing tall” under Reagan, who wore a cowboy hat and rode a white horse for publicity shots at his California ranch, not unlike more recent photos of Vladimir Putin out horse-riding bare-chested.
It’s an old trick, but it works. Ridiculed as a wimp during his time in the New York legislature, Teddy Roosevelt hit the gym and recast himself as a “Rough Rider.” Even Donald Trump, a pudgy golfer who dodged the draft, plays the role, although his bristling comes off like that of a bully seventh-grader who’d collapse at first punch.
Being the “strongman” is an image that works so well it’s a wonder we don’t make presidential candidates arm-wrestle. It harkens back to the era of kings who sometimes suited up and went into battle. Because we like to be led by people we consider superior to ourselves, leaders are quick to erase the line between president and superhero, or at least to blur it.
Globally, we are back to the future, with strongmen at the helms of the United States, Russia, Hungary, India, Italy, North Korea, and Poland. Articulate and thoughtful leaders like Canada’s Justin Trudeau and France’s Emmanuel Macron are derided as effeminate or ineffectual.
That’s reason to worry. History tells us that strongmen are a destabilizing force. They’re not good with words. They don’t deal well with nuance or diplomacy. They threaten each other a lot.
Unfortunately, that kind of brinksmanship often breaks into war when one leader must make himself yet larger, or when his standing in the polls drops, or when he has suffered too grave an embarrassment. It was the prickly relationships between strongmen and their hot-headed temperaments that set off both world wars.
We ourselves are to blame. We, like people of other nations who were hurting or confused or afraid, hungered for a big, tough leader, and elected him. And with the United States setting an example for the world, other nations followed in their choice of leadership.
The world is filling up with strongmen. They won’t get along. They never do.
This will not end well.