Jon Wiener: From The Nation Magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: a suggestion for Summer Reading: ‘M: Son of the Century’ is a 750-page historical novel about the rise of Mussolini, by Antonio Scurati. John Powers, critic-at-large for NPR’s Fresh Air, says the book suggests some parallels between 1920s Italy and Trump’s America. The book is out now, in paperback. But first: 6 million Democrats who voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024. What’s wrong with them? Pollster and strategist Celinda Lake has some answers–in a minute.
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Jon Wiener: Millions of Democrats who voted against Trump in 2020 did not vote in 2024. Who are they? What were they thinking? And most important, how can we get them back to voting in the midterms next year? Celinda Lake set out to find some answers. She’s a legendary Democratic pollster and strategist. She was one of two lead pollsters for the victorious Biden campaign in 2020. She’s done polling for unions, for Planned Parenthood, for NARAL, the abortion rights group, for feminist and gay groups. Her interviews and statistics have been quoted in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times – she’s appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and NPR. Celinda Lake, welcome to the program.
Celinda Lake: Thank you so much and it’s great to be on. And I love The Nation.
JW: The 2024 election numbers are still horrifying. Kamala Harris got 6 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years earlier. If most of those Biden voters had voted for her, she would’ve won. But instead, Trump became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. It makes me want to shout, ‘what is wrong with those people?’ But that was not your approach. Your approach was to identify a scientific sample of those non-voters and ask them some questions.
CL: So this study, which is one of a kind, was paid for and intellectually formulated by a group called Way to Win, which has been out there emphasizing contacting, emphasizing and developing grassroots, emphasizing and developing messages that really appealed to voters. This was a tough study to do. It’s hard to find these voters, and I really want to commend them. And they also turned these findings into action. They support ads, they support grassroots organizing. They support social media to reach these voters. So it was a real privilege to get to work with Way to Win.
JW: First of all, we need to know who are the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and then didn’t vote at all in 2024?
CL: And the answer is they were a little bit younger. They were very Democratic, actually. They did not want to vote for the lesser of two evils. And there are three kinds of conventional wisdoms that are completely wrong. One conventional wisdom was that they were toying with Trump. They hate Trump. This is not the reason that they stood out. The second was that they weren’t paying attention. They actually are very knowledgeable, but their knowledge led them to be quite discouraged about whether the Democrats were ever going to offer a real economic message, a real economic alternative to the Trump economy. And the third stereotype was that these voters are impossible to get, we have to be moderate, not liberal, and a whole bunch of other things. Again, couldn’t be more wrong. 72% of these voters felt that the problems in our country come from having an economic system where the richest 1% have taken 50 trillion in wealth from the 90% of Americans who work for a living. That was way more powerful than the statements about immigration, wokeness and spending.
JW: A lot of our friends say Harris’s lack of support among some people was based on her lack of support for Gaza and Palestinian rights. I know you asked about that. What did you find on that score?
CL: Well, one thing I want to say first of all in this interview is yes, there are things, of course, that the Harris campaign could have done better. But when you’ve got 107 days and you’re starting from scratch, I think she did a remarkable job. But I think the lessons are for the future. Gaza was important, particularly to a group of young – and Palestine, to a group of younger Democrats and younger drop off voters. But the economy was even more important. They also were very, very concerned about the affordable agenda. They were very, very angry at how the wealthy were getting ahead at the expense of ordinary people. And they saw very clearly a role for government. They wanted to have government take action on behalf of people. They did not support the DOGE approach or the Trump approach.
JW: One of the most important things you did was you showed there are some differences among the people who didn’t vote in 2024. It’s not quite true that if they had voted, all of them would’ve voted for Biden. There were some interesting differences in the demographics that you found. Some of them would’ve voted for Trump, a few of them would’ve voted for third party candidates.
CL: So you asked an early question that I think was very important. Who are these people? And first of all, 57% of them were women. So they’re not all men. Secondly, 52% were white, but 23% were African American. They were more heavily African American, 7% Latino and another 10% other groups of color. They were younger, a huge number of them, two thirds were under 50. They were a mix of college and blue-collar. people think of them — some people have this theory, they were all college students. Some people have this theory that they were all blue-collar. They were a mix. 62% of them were Democrats, but 23% of them were Republicans. 57% of them were liberal, 32, moderate, only 8% conservative. So one of the things I love about polling is that you get the real answers, and that conventional wisdom is wrong about 95% of the time, plus or minus 5%. There were some differences in the vote, and we saw particularly the younger, the female, the African American, more likely to vote for Biden, some defection among the Latino men.
Although again, some of these groups are now moving in our direction. So I think what’s really important about these Biden skippers is now is our moment to really speak to these voters. They are extremely unhappy with what they are seeing coming out of the Trump administration, they are very anti-Trump, but they don’t think we’re offering any alternative. And they particularly want an alternative around the economy, and they want alternative around healthcare. They’re very healthcare oriented, very oriented toward Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, research in cancer and Alzheimer’s, very oriented toward all kinds of healthcare, children’s nutrition, children’s healthcare. So this is a prime opportunity to push our advantage, but we have to offer an alternative. We have to take some action.
JW: Yeah, it’s really important that these are not kind of passive, ignorant, unmotivated, couch potato type people. These are people who, as you have said, pay attention, know what they think and didn’t find it in the Harris campaign. Another very important area that you studied is ‘where do they get their information about politics?’ I’m an old man. I watch TV. I read the newspaper. It turns out most people don’t read the newspaper anymore. Most people don’t watch TV news. And that’s one of the things that you studied in this, about the people who voted for Biden in 2020 and then did not vote for Harris in 2024. Where do they get their information about politics?
CL: Well, this group of voters is solidly online and solidly reliant on social media, and they’re very, very, very active consumers of social media. And we have seen a surge in their dependence on YouTube. YouTube has really grown to be their top news source.
They’re still also watching cable news. They are very active on Facebook. They take their news, even if it’s coming from a newspaper like New York Times or something, they’re getting it on the website or the app or the online source. They’re not getting it directly. They’re TikTok-oriented. They’re X-oriented as well, particularly the conservative end. And they’re very heavy into streaming content. So they are online in every medium in multiple mediums. They’re looking for content from authentic voices. They’re looking for direct content from the candidates. They don’t want it mediated. They don’t want it to sound like a convincing battery out of a bowl. There are some variations. Men are more likely to be relying on sports channels and YouTube and younger voters, very heavy on TikTok. Black voters are very heavy on cable news, so there is some variation, but they are really solidly online from multiple sources.
JW: And then you also looked at what kinds of messages are most effective in appealing to them, and you found out that they, there’s a lot of enthusiasm for candidates who promise to fight.
CL: They really want to a fighter. They really want candidates to offer specific alternatives. They want candidates to stand up and they think that Democratic candidates are not doing that. 78% of these voters are favorable to Bernie Sanders. 64% are favorable to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 67 to Democrats in Congress. They want to give Democrats in Congress a chance. They want to see them stand up. They like governors, Democratic governors because they think they have to produce, they have to stand up. They have to offer an alternative. They despise MAGA Republicans and despise Donald Trump and despise Elon Musk and DOGE. But they want to hear from our side.
JW: I have a question about this strategy of promising to fight. I’ve seen some research recently that recommends a strategy, I’m sure you know about this, called ‘de-polarization’ -the opposite message, which is, it goes like this: ‘Are you sick and tired of all the fighting in Washington, the name calling that doesn’t do anything to help with our real problems? I’ll work with anyone who wants to make the cost of living more affordable, who wants to make medical care and childcare affordable. Our politicians may not admit it, but we have more in common with most people share a lot of the same goals. So let’s work together on the basis of our shared values to find real solutions that make life better for all of us. ‘This is a depolarizing message that emphasizes common ground. What do you think about that? You’re a key strategist on this.
CL: Well, I think the two can be merged. First of all, real people and the Biden skippers do not want to fight each other. And they think honestly, like the women, for example, think any three women in America can agree on more than Congress does. What they want to fight are the lobbyists, the big donors, the wealthy corporations, the MAGA Republicans. So yes, they want to unite and work together. They want to come together to make change because they think that individuals cannot make change. They were very worried that their vote make no difference and thought that – they were very negative about whether Harris had already lost before the election. They think other people share their goals of trying to get healthcare affordable for everyone, for example, get prescription drug prices down, get surprise billing ended, but they want to fight the lobbyists, the corporate power, the political donors. So I think what’s being misunderstood here is yes, they want to unite with other people and they think they have shared goals, but they think if you’re going to get this accomplished, you’re going to have to take on some people. You’re going to have to stand up. You’re going to have to fight corporate greed and corporate profiteering.
JW: Looking forward to the midterms next year, you were very interested in the question of what will it take to get the people who sat out 2024 back involved in voting in the midterms? And you also studied, if congressional elections were held right now, which of those non-voters would vote Democratic and which would vote for somebody else? What did you find on that score?
CL: They’d vote overwhelmingly Democratic. But the things that need to happen are, one, they have to be contacted and they can’t be contacted two days before the election. They can’t be treated like they have no choice. They’ve already proved to us they have a choice. 35% of them said they were not contacted by any campaign in this last election. Only 39% of them said they were contacted by the Harris campaign. Half of the young people, half of the independents, a large number of the women, said they weren’t contacted by anybody. So we have to be out there. We have to contact them; we have to get engaged with them. And these are people that showed up at the No Kings rally, but still haven’t resolved whether they’re going to vote on the election day. We have to offer them real choices. We have to run a new generation of candidates who stand for something, and then we have to lay out an agenda.
We have to pick some fights. We have to say, ‘if you elect me, I will do X, Y, and Z, and I will fight to get that done, and I will unite all of us together in that goal.’ For example, one of the things we did with this group in another study was look at the government agencies that they like. They love, for example, EPA. And when we said, ‘isn’t EPA controversial, blah, blah, blah,’ one person in the focus group in this other study said, ‘who wants to drink poison water?’ People are united together. What they don’t see is the politician taking on the toxic numbers.
JW: Yeah. One of the things I like best about your conclusions here is that you strongly recommended that Democratic candidates go beyond advocating for single issues. You talked about something you called ‘overall worldview framing’ that people who didn’t vote really respond to what is overall worldview framing and what is the one that we need to promote in our candidates?
CL: Let me read you our top testing message, just to give you an idea: “The American people need a Democratic party that stands strong and pushes back against the Trump administration. The president and his rich friends care more about tax breaks for the wealthy than making the cost of the things we buy go down, or helping American workers. Democrats need to be the ones to unite the American people regardless of race, class, or zip code, against this government takeover, and demand representation for all of us, not just the top 1%.” It does have that unity message, but it’s not milquetoast. It’s unifying people behind shared values and a shared goal to make things happen and to bring about change.
JW: Celinda Lake, legendary pollster and Democratic strategist – you can read about her new study of Democratic voters who skipped the 2024 election in Rolling Stone. Celinda, thanks for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.
CL: Thank you for having me, and I want to also give another shout out to Way to Win. So thank you – and thank The Nation for giving voice to these findings.
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JW: It’s summer, and that means it’s time for summer beach reading. With longer days and warmer weather, we wanted to find a book that is long and captivating. So we asked John Powers. Of course, he’s critic at large on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where he has millions of listeners. John, welcome back.
John Powers: I’m glad to be here, Jon.
JW: What has been your beach reading so far this summer?
JP: Well, actually, the big, exciting book that I read, and it is a beach classic, is called “M: Son of the Century,” by Antonio Scurati. And it is the first volume of a massive series of novels about the career of Benito Mussolini.
JW: I looked this up. In fact, I read it myself after you recommended it. It’s a bestseller and award winner in Italy. It’s been translated into 40 languages. The English translation by Anne Milano Appel is terrifically vivid and compelling.
But what struck me was that the rise of Mussolini is so different from the rise of Trump. Mussolini started out as the leader of a small group of bitter war veterans in the wake of World War I, when half a million Italians had been killed, and hundreds of thousands of returning soldiers were facing unemployment and a lack of food. That was nothing like America in 2015, where you will recall, the Obama years were coming to a conclusion, and Trump first appeared in the Republican Primary.
nd then Mussolini’s own background is the opposite of Trump’s. Mussolini started out an unknown and impoverished journalist and socialist. Trump, I don’t need to tell you, was a billionaire real estate developer and popular TV personality. So different.
JP: Well, they are very different. It would be impossible not to concede that point, and to add that it’s always dangerous to find historical analogues.
Yet what was peculiar was as I was reading the Scurati novel, I kept being struck by how things resonated with the present moment. For example, in the discussion of Mussolini, whose background isn’t at all Trump’s, what is common to Trump’s, is there’s a kind of anti-establishment fervor in both of them, that plays into the sense that the elites are running things, and not in the way that ordinary people like.
At the time of Mussolini, there were both the socialists, who were exceedingly popular at the time, and a small group of fascists. Mussolini, who started as a socialist, had moved to the fascists. And yet, he caught some things that I think that Trump caught. One of the key moments at the beginning, is when one of his people is trying to explain what the ideology of fascism should be. And Mussolini’s thought is, we don’t really need an official ideology. We need to have the sense of excitement, that we’re moving forward, that we’re for Italy, that it’s kind of a show, that we want people caught up in the emotion of the event, rather than a series of policies, which are after all dreary.
And then when you mention the disaffected soldiers, they were a group called the Arditi, who were the great warrior Navy SEAL types of World War I for the Italians. They came back, they didn’t have jobs, they’re disaffected. But they liked doing lots of the violent stuff that soldiers like that do.
JW: What struck me the hardest in Scurati’s book was the violence. And not just the rhetoric, not just the aura of Mussolini, but the way his followers actually terrorized and killed socialist leaders and activists in horrifying ways, killing a socialist peasant organizer in front of his family and children. Mussolini’s method, as Scurati describes it, was to “stir up violence and disorder to show that only he could remedy it, unleash the squadristi with one hand, and rein them in with the other.”
JP: Yes, and you can actually see that that is part of what’s going on. So the Trump argument that we are in a chaotic situation, so much of the violence and chaos is produced by his people. On Election Day, I think there is almost no risk that a polling place would be taken over by crazed leftists. Yet I can easily imagine, as in the succession scenario, that you could imagine in Wisconsin, a group of Trump followers would take over a polling place, or where votes are being counted, and burn it to the ground, if necessary, if they thought he was going to lose.
Mussolini does see violence as a tool. It’s a tool both for cowing the left, which then gets cowed, but also, it’s useful to the people who are in power. The classic mistake, I think that businesspeople and conservative government people make, is they always think, “Oh, we’re going to be able to control the fascist impulse in people.” It was also true in Germany, of course. You think, “Oh, this guy isn’t that great. He will do what we need to get done. He will stop the socialists, then we will control him and take him over,” not realizing that, of course, that’s not going to work.
JW: And Scurati, in his novel about the rise of Mussolini, M, also paints a vivid, really unforgettable picture of who the fascist followers were. Could you read to us from the first meeting of what Mussolini called the Grand Council of Fascism, in 1923, when the party leaders posed for a photograph and Scurati tells us about it?
JP: Okay: “They’re all fascists. A toxic cloud of disappointed ambitions, revolutionary frustrations, confirmed biases, a fetid miasma of familiar rivalries, local constituencies, tribal vendettas, village squabbles, a suffocating spray of factions, dissidences, extremisms. For the most part, they’re mediocre, greedy, petty men, raised to their rank by the updrafts stirred up in Italy’s sky by the Mussolini cyclone, and appointed directly by him, the supreme leader. Yet, instead of gratitude, the beveled glass mirrors of the Grand Hotel reflect devious, scowling, gloomy looks of discontent.”
What I like about this is, one of the great things is, that just as, let’s say centrist politicians in Italy, who think they’re using Mussolini, Mussolini has his own collection of mediocrities, and thugs, and climbers who work for him, that he’s struggling to control.
And one of the great themes of the last third of this first part of the book, which ends with him becoming the dictator of Italy, is him trying to control the thugs, whose threat he has used to take power. The problem is, even after he takes power, they still want to go around killing leftists, burning buildings down, and doing all the stuff he doesn’t want. Because his whole point was that he could control them. And in fact, he can’t control them, so he actually hates, and in a way that I suspect that Trump hates, a lot of his followers. You’re using them, but in fact you don’t connect to them, or identify, but you think they’re stupid people.
JW: Yes. Another key theme of Scurati’s novel, M, that we shouldn’t forget about, is that Mussolini’s party won elections. The 1919 elections in Italy were the first elections there in which all adult males had the right to vote. And at first the fascists got no representatives in the parliament, but then he formed an alliance with the liberal parties. And eventually, was named Prime Minister. And it was only then that he ended what democracy there had been.
JP: Yes, but I think the sadder part of that story, Jon, is that in these elections, the winners, hugely in the North especially, were socialists. Sometimes they were getting 80% of the vote. And as you read, you see how, partly because they’re eager to govern, partly because they’re not drawn to violence in the same way as the fascists, that people who have 80% of the vote find their province being taken over by someone who might’ve gotten 5% of the vote, because that 5% was prepared to go into the countryside, as you’ve mentioned earlier, and kill people in front of their families, to burn down working men’s associations, to get in the way of the legal swearing in of the people.
And that, it’s a sad thing to say, but I think it’s been true a lot of the times, is that the left isn’t as strong when it comes to fighting as the right has been.
It’s interesting that Mussolini, at one point in this book, is expressing his admiration for Lenin, because Lenin did what you have to do. And Mussolini is contemptuous of the eloquent socialists, like Turati, or even the hero of Giacomo Matteotti, who was the great socialist hero of that era, because he was constantly talking up against Mussolini. But what they aren’t prepared to do is do the ruthless stuff.
In Bologna, in 1920, they’d won 80% of the vote. They’re going to swear in ex-railroad man as the mayor of the city. A group of fascists come create a riot. And what happens is, there’s enough violence and death, that it discredits the socialist because it proves they can’t keep order. And in fact, they never get to take power in the city they won 80% of the vote of.
As we, people who think of ourselves as being on the left, think this is something you have to remember. We look at various revolutions we’ve had, and you think, when you hear discussions, should Allende have purged more people along the way? And you think, history indicates that probably he should have. We don’t like to do it. We like to think we’re rational, sensible people.
Also, the point about fascism is it was about tearing down something. And the thing about socialism was it was about building something up. And it’s easy when you’re building something up, to not want to get involved in all the violence, because it is destructive. You’re trying not to destroy; you’re trying to build. But people who want to destroy have the edge because they don’t care whether they destroy. Whereas, if you’re trying to build, you do.
JW: So as you say, in Scurati’s account of the rise of Mussolini, the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti is the hero of the book, the single voice of determined resistance in a kind of spineless parliament. And his assassination creates a crisis for Italy. Really the most upsetting thing in the book is Scurati’s evidence that Mussolini probably could have been stopped at that point. After the assassination of Matteotti, he says the majority of Italians horrified by the crime wanted to see the fall of fascism, and that Mussolini himself sank into an apathetic inertia and wasn’t sure what to do. And then what happened?
JP: What happens is that the people who could stop him, including the socialists, don’t propose the things that you could do. They fritter away, I think, a lot of the outrage in eloquent speeches, in newspaper columns. They don’t actually push the votes in the parliament that would’ve gotten him out.
The strength of fascism was always that Mussolini was going to send his Blackshirts to take over Rome. One of the reasons he got appointed Prime Minister was because he could stop the Blackshirts from coming and descending on Rome and trashing it. And that this is the first case where it happens, where Mussolini knows that if the army had tried to stop them then, the Blackshirts would’ve run off in fear, because whenever the Army faced the Blackshirts, the army would win. But they wouldn’t do that.
In this particular case, once again, Mussolini keeps waiting in these final pages, for them to do the thing that would just throw him out. And no one ever rises to the occasion, because the people in the center think, “Oh, we can work our way around him and we hate the socialists.”
The people on the left weren’t great at fighting, in truth, and they didn’t want the conflict. And I think they thought reason would prevail. And the strongest of them, Matteotti’s been murdered. Even in the way he’s murdered, which is interesting, as it’s presented by Scurati, and I’m not sure it’s true, but because nobody could actually know the truth, because it was all private stuff, Mussolini’s arranged for Matteotti’s death, maybe in the way that the Gangland boss arranges for it. He makes it clear it would be great if Matteotti was dead.
But in the book, he’s genuinely shocked and horrified when they actually murder him, because he didn’t order it. Because he knows that if the murder is bad, it could cost him everything. But he has these overenthusiastic, violence-loving people, who are more than happy to kill the socialist leader. And the problem is, Matteotti was the brave and heroic one. And you realize there was a kind of cowardice, that if they would kill him, then maybe they would kill you.
Since we’re extrapolating to the modern world.
JW: Yes.
JP: I always wonder why it is, that say Mitch McConnell, who’d gotten what he wanted, wouldn’t have pursued just finishing Trump off? I think with some of these people, there is a genuine fear of unleashing violence from the hardcore Trump people. I think there’s actually physical fear that a lot of these people have. It would be a scary thing, if you are identified as the person who got Trump, the hero, impeached so he could never run again.
JW: “Hang Mike Pence.”
JP: “Hang Mike Pence.” There is that side of it. And the thing is, you think some of his followers would do it.
JW: So pulling the lens back here for a minute, the book has dozens of characters, and luckily for us readers, it has a cast of characters at the end, it’s about five pages long. The most fascinating to me was Mussolini’s lover and mentor, Margherita Sarfatti, an art critic from an elite Jewish family in Venice. What the heck was she doing with Mussolini?
JP: She was drawn, as many intellectuals are, to power. She was drawn to – he obviously had a charisma, a sexual charisma, and I think she too felt she could control him. He will go to art galleries, and she’s connected him up with artists. Because the thing about Mussolini, as a distinct from some of the other thug dictators we’ve seen, is that he was actually a smart and more intellectual person than most of the rest of the society.
One of my favorite moments in this thing, and this is how Sarfatti enters, is that Mussolini is going to address a group of his thugs. And at one point he says something like, “If I can shift to a quotation from Goethe,” and then does it. And you thought, he would be quoting Goethe to his Blackshirts, that says something.
And in fact, what was interesting when I was reading around this, I was reading Luigi Barzini’s book on The Italians, which has a great chapter on Mussolini, and one of the things that he says is that Mussolini was a brilliant journalist. When he ran Avanti!, the socialist paper, he was worshiped as the great writer for that paper, and was a great journalist. And then he started, Il Popolo d’Italia, which is the right-wing paper, and he was a great writer. And there are examples of his writing in this book. And you think, he’s a good vivid writer.
And so, Sarfatti, with this charismatic kind of animalistic guy who wants power, you think you can control him, but you’re surrounded by what is obviously energy. He is charismatic. I think when you look at him now, it’s kind of comically charismatic. But he must have had something, because he was plowing through women in those years, like nobody’s business.
One of the recurring themes, is like every 40 pages there’s some new young woman that he’s drawn to. His wife and Sarfatti are the two continuing ones, at least in this first part of the book. And even by the end, she has the problem that she’s now into her forties, so it’s going to be pretty much all over for her soon.
JW: Why does Antonio Scurati call this a novel? The history, as far as I know, is completely accurate. I’m told the book was vetted by real historians, to make sure the places, and the dates, and the quotes were all correct. All the events really happened, all the characters were real people. He has real documentary sources at the end of every chapter. Why is this a novel?
JP: Well, it’s a novel because he actually is telling you what Mussolini is thinking. And that’s the thing you can’t know. You can infer what Mussolini is thinking. And you’re dramatizing scenes you didn’t actually see. These days, if you think of a Norman Mailer reported thing, when I think, for example, of a full novelistic version might be The Autumn of the Patriarch by García Márquez, or El Señor Presidente. Those are the ones where you’re making up a dictator.
And then there would be things like Solzhenitsyn doing Stalin, where you’re kind of doing it satirically. Whereas, what’s interesting about this is, I think he’s trying, insofar as he can, given that he doesn’t like Mussolini, to more or less give Mussolini his due, in terms of how he thinks about things.
He’s not a completely unsympathetic character in this book, because he actually has normal thoughts along the way. His politics are monstrous, but he does seem like he comes off as a human being, even in the places where he’s – because he’s constantly being weak, which I think is one of the other interesting things.
JW: Yeah.
JP: Because his whole point is to rise to the top. So he’s constantly caught in the way, that I think sometimes that all politicians are. But even Trump, like Trump, he wants to seem tough all the time. But he realized, if I seem tough here, that’s going to hurt me. And I want to be loved, also. I want the country to think I should be in charge of everything, so I can’t do it, and then they get caught up in this bind.
And Mussolini’s having what happens to him all the time. And you’re stuck with the fact that you have thugs you don’t like, who are your base. And what do you do with it? That can be paralyzing too. And then once again, the other Trump analogy is that in the end, he made it because rich and powerful people supported him. They could have stopped him, and they didn’t. And you think of the rich and powerful people that you keep reading about, who are for Trump, even though they should probably think, “He’s going to mess up the economy with those tariffs.” Nevertheless, they don’t think that.
JW: This book, M: Son of the Century, was published in Italy in 2018. And it was followed in 2022 by the next book in the series, titled M: The Man of Providence. That was published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Mussolini’s march on Rome, and it was a very big deal in Italy. The third book in the series has also been published in Italian, M: The Last Days of Europe, which focuses on Mussolini from 1938 to 1940. That was published last year in Italy. All three were hugely successful bestsellers. The fourth and final volume is in the works.
We have heard that Harper, the publisher here, is considering publishing an abridged translation of the next two. Are you ready to go to work on that one?
JP: I think maybe I could live with the abridgment. I’m not sure how much of my life I want to give to Mussolini. And I think maybe these are the most interesting years. I think one of the interesting things that emerges from the book, that probably people kind of knew but maybe didn’t know, is that he’s not antisemitic. That not only does he have the Jewish lover who he really likes, he was hiring Jewish architects. He liked Jewish writers. It’s only because, basically to placate Hitler, that he turns antisemitic. But it’s not a gut feeling for him. It’s not a driving principle. I wouldn’t mind reading about that period.
JW: The part I want to get to, is where he’s hanging from his heels in 1945.
JP: Oh yeah, that’s a good part. I was recently in Milan, and unfortunately, the gas station where they did that is no longer there. It’s either next door to or has been replaced by a McDonald’s, which I think is somehow some sort of wonderful historical thing.
JW: The book is Antonio Scurati’s mammoth novel about the rise of Mussolini, M: Son of the Century, 773 pages, translated by Anne Milano Appel. It’s scarier than Stephen King.
JP: It is scary. And even though you quite rightly began this by saying that there’s so many ways that our America is not like 1919 Italy, as you read it, every few pages, you’ll get something that will give you a shiver of recognition, of realizing how these things play out a hundred years later.
JW: “A shiver of recognition.” John Powers, thanks for our summer reading beach pick.
JP: It is always my pleasure, Jon.
JW: Antonio Scurati’s novel about the rise of Mussolini, “M: Son of the Century,” is out now in paperback – 800 pages long. It’s been translated in 40 languages and made into a TV series which is showing now on Mubi. The next four volumes of the bio-novel, published in Italian, are not available in English. We spoke with John Powers about it in August, 2024.