Authoritarian leaders train and condition the public to follow and obey them -– or at the very least to not oppose them. This training takes various forms, such as threats of violence and acts of intimidation, propaganda with an emphasis on disinformation and misinformation, generating a state of constant precarity, fear, and death anxieties (what I have termed “horror politics”), manipulating White Christianity and other belief systems, and more generally offering incentives and rewards for supporting the authoritarian and the movement and the regime. Those who resist or are not sufficiently supportive will be punished – severely.
In a 2021 essay, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat offered these insights into the power of propaganda and its role in authoritarian training and conditioning:
