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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Strongman: Why Democracies Choose Their Own Destruction

The Strongman: Why Democracies Choose Their Own Destruction

Lane, Victor

Paperback

General Political Science

ISBN13: 9798196840135
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 13 2026
Pages: 154
Weight: 0.47
Height: 0.33 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The final book in the Psychology of Power series answers the question the previous four volumes were building toward: why do free people choose the leader who destroys their freedom?

Obedience explained why ordinary people comply with destructive authority. The Dictator's Brain revealed what unchecked power does to those who hold it. Propaganda showed how consent is manufactured at scale. The Inner Circle exposed how proximity to power corrupts those around it.

The Strongman asks the deepest question of all: why do democracies - with free elections, functioning institutions, and living memory of what authoritarianism costs - repeatedly invite it back in?

Drawing on political psychology, neuroscience, and the comparative history of democratic collapse, Victor Lane examines the specific mechanisms through which anxiety, the hunger for simplicity, wounded national identity, and tribal loyalty generate the conditions in which authoritarian leadership becomes not merely acceptable but necessary - to the very people it will ultimately harm.

From Weimar Germany and Mussolini's Italy to Orbán's Hungary, Erdoğan's Turkey, and the global pattern of twenty-first century democratic backsliding, The Strongman maps the recurring template with unflinching precision. It then turns to the question that matters most: what did the democracies that survived do differently - and what does democratic defence actually require of the individual citizen?

The Psychology of Power series concludes here - not with despair, but with the most important argument it has to make: the choice is always still available, until the moment it is not.

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