Ruth Ben-Ghiat surveys 100 years of authoritarians, how they came to power, how they stay in power, and what resistance and removal look like. Much of it is hard to read, but we’ll worth doing so, because ultimately it is a handbook to spotting dictators and pushing back against them before they begin to consolidate power. ‘Strongmen’ is a complement to Timothy Snyder’s book, ‘On Tyranny,’ because both agree that individuals have a role to play in putting down authoritarianism by resisting from the start, strengthening institutions like good journalism and the courts, demanding transparency, and behaving ourselves with honesty and empathy. Ben-Ghiat adds radical love to the list of countermeasures, encouraging those suckered in by tyrants to become part of a democratic polity again. The scary question she poses in the Afterword to the paperback edition remains to be answered, however: “What happens in a bipartisan system when one of two parties turns toward autocracy?” (266). “The time-tested methods of autocracy—electoral manipulation, voter suppression, the criminalization of protest, political violence, and disinformation—are now part of the way the GOP conducts its business as a far-right party,” she writes (271). Are we going to reward that?