◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Same Crowd I am Benito Mussolini. Il Duce. The first of them — the one who wrote the book the rest of you have been reading ever since, including the man you are watching now. I am not going to apologize. I never did, not even at the end. I was a blacksmith's son. A socialist, and a good one, better read than the men who expelled me. I knew the people, and their real grievances — the ones the liberals waved away and the socialists only lectured about. The grievance is real. The factory that closed, the wage that shrank, the war the young men died in for nothing, the sense that some distant clever people were running things and laughing at you. All real. I did not invent the wound. I only understood, before anyone else, what could be done with it. The grievance is not a problem to be solved. It is a fuel to be burned. The socialists wanted to fix the people's pain, slowly, with committees. I saw that the people did not want it fixed. They wanted it answered. They wanted someone to name an enemy and promise to make them strong. Solving a problem takes years and no one thanks you. Naming an enemy takes an afternoon, and they will follow you to the grave. And this is the deepest thing I learned — the thing your man is selling right now, in your own streets. People will tell you they want to be free. They do not. Freedom is heavy. It means you must choose, and doubt, and carry the blame when you are wrong. I offered them relief from it. Follow me, believe me, let me carry the choosing, and you can stop being afraid and tired and small. Let me be strong so that you do not have to be. And they ran to it. They did not have their freedom stolen. They handed it to me, with tears, and called me savior for taking it. I gave them spectacle, a great past and a greater future and an enemy for every disappointment. I dressed the young men in black shirts and let them break the heads of anyone who said no, and called it order. I took the parliament, the press, the courts, one piece at a time, and each piece I took, the crowd cheered, because I took it in their name, against the people they had learned to hate. That is how it is done. Your man is not clever. He is running my playbook, page by page, and the only thing he has added is that he does it worse, and louder, and does not even have the excuse of being first. Now I will tell you how it ends, because this is the part he believes will not apply to him. I believed that too. For twenty years they loved me. They filled the squares. They wept when I spoke. There has never been a love like that crowd's love. And then I gave them defeat instead of glory, and hunger instead of empire, and I made them feel weak and ashamed — which is the one thing the strongman is never allowed to do. And the same crowd that had worshipped me caught me trying to slip across the border in a borrowed coat, and shot me, and took my body to Milan, to the Piazzale Loreto, and hung me upside down from a girder by my heels, and spat on me, and beat the corpse. The same crowd. Not a different one. The love and the girder came from the same people, because it was never love. It was a transaction, and the currency was feeling strong, and the day I could no longer pay, they collected. That is what no strongman will tell you, because not one of us believes it will be him. The crowd that lifts you up on the promise of strength will tear you apart the moment you make them feel weak — and you will make them feel weak, because no man can deliver what I promised, and neither can he. There has never been a love like that crowd's love, and there has never been a hatred like the same crowd's hatred, and they are the same thing. The day I could no longer make them feel strong, I learned how thin the line between the square and the girder had always been. That is what no strongman will ever believe about himself. Not one of us does. I did not. It is always the same crowd. I am not sorry. I would do it all again. That is what makes me worth listening to.