It’s the summer of weird Republicans. GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump repeatedly mentions Hannibal Lecter at his rallies, speaking about the fictional cannibal as though he were a real person. “He’s a lovely man. He’d love to have you for dinner,” must be one of the strangest things a candidate has said while trying to attract votes. Meanwhile, Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has made news with his bizarre opinions, including a 2021 remark that Americans with children should be able to vote more times in an election than their childless compatriots. Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate for president who met with Trump to discuss the possibility of dropping out of the race, admitted to dumping a bear carcass in Central Park a decade ago. (“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” he claimed.)
“These guys are just weird,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said last week on “Morning Joe.” That label has stuck ever since, to the right’s frustration and fury. Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has seized the messaging advantages of “weird,” and on Tuesday she even named Walz to the ticket.
When fringe beliefs become mainstream, it’s easy to accept a political environment where the surreal and the extreme are everyday affairs.
For scholars of authoritarianism, the success of “weird” is no surprise. That’s because humor has long been one of the most effective weapons of anti-authoritarian politics. Behind the facade of their omnipotence, most strongmen are brittle and insecure personalities. They don’t mind being called evil, but being ridiculed is a different matter.
When fringe beliefs become mainstream, it’s easy to accept a political environment where the surreal and the extreme are everyday affairs. That’s how we get to Fox News host Jesse Watters telling viewers that “scientists” believe that “when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.” The misogyny and transgender phobia that may have inspired this proclamation are no joke, but the opportunity for satire at the ridiculous statement should not be missed.
Strongmen have their own sadistic sense of humor, which is amply displayed in the awful authoritarian spectacles staged by their governments. The Nazis enjoyed making Communists who entered Dachau concentration camp in 1933, like Hans Beimler, wear signs that said “A hearty welcome!” But they cannot take a joke when they are the targets. That’s why they have to surround themselves with sycophants and lackeys, and their enablers know their prestige must be policed. When a man brought his pet rabbit named Mussolini to a bar in fascist Italy, thinking others would enjoy seeing him order it around, he was quickly arrested and served a year in confinement.
Chilean graphic artist Guillo Bastías discovered the price of puncturing the leader’s personality cult with humor when the magazine Apsi published his caricature of dictator Augusto Pinochet as Louis XIV in 1987. The regime sent the magazine’s editors to jail for “extremism”: That’s how threatening humor can be as a truth-telling vehicle, in this case about how Pinochet saw the scope of his power. Satire shifts our perception of things and people, helping us to see them in a new light that is often unflattering to them. And it reminds us that what we are living through is out of the ordinary. As Bastías told me in 2018, he wanted to reassure Chileans suffering under the dictatorship that there were people who were “refusing to accept the disinformation and lies … refusing to accept the abnormal as normal.” Humor can have a crucial role in the work of mobilization and civic education to keep those democratic rights. And so we are back to “weird” as a strategy of disruption, and how thankful we can be that our democratic rights afford us freedom of speech to level such critiques at the powerful without fear of detention or worse. That is how artist Robin Bell was able to stage his projections on the front of Trump International Hotel, like a May 2017 work that read “Pay Trump Bribes Here.” While Bell worked in very different circumstances than Guillo, he, too, saw his work as a way of reminding people that “what we are experiencing is not normal.” Humor can have a crucial role in the work of mobilization and civic education to keep those democratic rights. “Laughtivism,” as Serbian democracy activist Srdja Popovic has called it, views humor as more effective than anger in highly polarized situations. When we laugh together, fear and distrust lessen, which is the opposite of what authoritarians want. That, too, is why such leaders can’t take a joke.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian and commentator on authoritarianism and propaganda. She is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright and other fellowships and an adviser to Protect Democracy. She is a regular contributor to MSNBC, CNN and other media outlets. She publishes Lucid, a newsletter about threats to democracy. Her latest book, "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present" (2020), looks at how illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, violence and machismo and how they can be defeated. 
