The Paradox of the Strongman
The Effective Leader and the Repeatability Crisis
How are strongmen judged after their deaths? You might expect their oppressed subjects to shatter monuments, celebrate in the streets, and remember the tyrant with horror and loathing. But history rarely conforms to that expectation.
In 2025, the Levada Center asked Russians to name “the most outstanding individuals of all time and peoples.” Their top choice, Josef Stalin, received 42% of the vote—well ahead of Putin (32%), Lenin (28%), and Alexander Pushkin (24%). In a 2020 poll by the same organization, three out of four respondents said the Soviet era was the greatest time in their country’s history.
This phenomenon is not confined to Russia. From 2015 to 2018, two Washington Post reporters conducted over 70 interviews with Chinese citizens about their memories of Maoism. As Jeffrey Javed and Iza Ding recalled:
A sizable proportion described a world of purity and simplicity, where life had clear meaning, people trusted and helped one another and inequality was minimal. In the words of our interviewees, people’s “spiritual life” was richer during the Maoist era, even though their “material life” was poor.
Nostalgia and trauma often coexist in these memories. Many of our older respondents who lived through the Maoist period felt some degree of nostalgia for the past and expressed support for Mao even while acknowledging negative experiences.
Clearly, something shaped these memories—something stronger than suffering. For all their failings, these leaders gave their people something very important.
They gave them meaning.
The Appeal
Strongmen have clear advantages over bureaucratic systems. They are not constrained by process, procedure, or the need for consensus. Decisions can be made quickly and carried out immediately. There are no committee meetings, no negotiations, and no competing interests to reconcile. The Strongman speaks, and it is done.
The Strongman fulfills another need as well: he is unmistakably the Man in Charge. But he is not just the leader of the state—he is its embodiment. The identity of the nation becomes inseparable from his own. He is not so much a politician as a myth given flesh.
We have an innate need for myths, leaders, and clarity. The Strongman answers that need. He tells us who we are and where we are going. He makes us part of something larger than ourselves. And he replaces an ambiguous, unsatisfying present with the promise of a restored and more meaningful past.
The Conditions for Success
Not every aspiring Strongman succeeds. Many crave power. Few acquire it. Fewer still manage to hold onto it. What separates those who endure from those who fall?
Charisma matters, but not as much as competence. A Strongman must have a strategic vision—a clear sense of where he intends to take his country and how to get there. Power brings constant temptation, and he must have the discipline to follow that course despite distractions, rivalries, and short-term pressures.
A Strongman may wield immense authority, but he still rules over millions. His policies must produce tangible benefits, whether material or symbolic. His people must believe that he acts in their interest and that he is willing to bear costs on their behalf.
We often imagine Strongmen as rulers sustained by terror alone. But this most often describes the final stages of their rule. When a Strongman begins to rely primarily on fear, it is often because he has lost something more important. A tyrant must be feared—but he must also be trusted. Once that trust erodes, his position becomes fragile, and his downfall is often close behind.
Strongmen typically come to power in times of crisis. As Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor observed, hungry people will choose bread over freedom. The Strongman performs best when the system performs worst. He does not arrive as a tyrant—he comes as a helper, providing for people when existing institutions have failed them.
The Performance Illusion
Strongmen are often remembered as effective leaders despite mixed track records. There’s more going on here than propaganda or ignorance. Their posthumous reputations reflect the way people perceive success, assign credit, and remember the past.
By virtue of their charisma and forceful personalities, Strongmen appear effective. That appearance of success can be just as powerful—and far more lasting—than actual results. A grey bureaucrat’s achievements are often forgotten. A Strongman’s legacy may endure as myth, even when the facts diverge from the perception.
Strongmen often produce immediate, tangible outcomes. New roads, defeated rivals, restored order—these are results people can see, feel, and remember. Economic downturns, institutional damage, and human suffering unfold more slowly. The triumphs feel real, while the costs fade into the background.
Credit follows the same pattern. The Strongman takes responsibility for success, while failure is attributed to enemies, saboteurs, or disloyal subordinates. Victories demonstrate the leader’s strength. Defeats reveal hidden opposition.
Strongmen favor simple, compelling stories. A leader. A crisis. A resolution. The complexity of systems is replaced by the leader’s will and action. These narratives are easier to understand—and easier to remember—than the slow, impersonal workings of institutions.
Over time, memory reinforces this pattern. People remember what felt meaningful. Details fade, while the sense of purpose, clarity, and shared direction remains. Suffering is not always denied, but it is reframed as part of a larger story.
The appeal is real. The conditions for success are real. And the perception of effectiveness is powerful. But everything depends on a single, unstable variable: the individual who holds power.
The Crisis of Repeatability
For over 80 years Rome enjoyed peace and prosperity under the reign of the Five Good Emperors. The last, Marcus Aurelius, is considered by many to be the best of the five, certainly the most moral.
His study of Stoicism and his Meditations made him an archetype of Plato’s Philosopher-King. He led Rome through wars and a devastating plague. Then, in 180, Aurelius died. His eighteen-year-old son, Commodus, succeeded him as emperor.
You will note that we do not speak of the “Six Good Emperors.”
Cassius Dio wrote that Commodus transformed Rome “from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.” He was more interested in fighting in the Colosseum and erecting statues of himself as Hercules than in governing. As discontent grew, he increasingly relied on assassinations and executions to maintain control.
On December 31, 192, his mistress Marcia had him poisoned. When the poison failed, his wrestling partner Narcissus strangled him in his bath.
Commodus was not necessarily an evil ruler. He was simply a bad one. As Dio observed, he was:
not naturally wicked but, on the contrary, as guileless as any man that ever lived. His great simplicity, however, together with his cowardice, made him the slave of his companions, and it was through them that he at first, out of ignorance, missed the better life and then was led on into lustful and cruel habits, which soon became second nature.
This is the central problem of Strongman rule. A system built around a single individual does not produce consistent outcomes. It produces variability.
When you give your rulers absolute power, sooner or later you will be ruled by an unworthy sovereign.
Rome enjoyed a remarkable run of competent autocrats. But that success could not be sustained. After Commodus, the Empire entered a long period of instability that culminated in the Crisis of the Third Century and, eventually, the long decline of Rome itself.
The Paradox Defined
The qualities that make Strongmen effective are the same qualities that make them dangerous. They can cut through bureaucratic red tape, but they can also silence dissent. They can act quickly, but they can also act rashly.
There are no competing centers of power, no independent institutions, and no meaningful checks. Errors are not corrected early. Bad decisions are not challenged. Over time, small mistakes compound into larger failures, and there are fewer mechanisms available to stop them. What removes resistance also removes correction.
Strongman systems can produce rapid, visible gains in the short term. They can mobilize resources, impose order, and act with a level of coordination that more complex systems struggle to match. But those gains often come at the cost of long-term resilience. A system that cannot adapt, question itself, or absorb dissent becomes increasingly fragile as conditions change.
A competent leader may produce good outcomes for a time. An incompetent one can cause immense damage very quickly. The structure does not distinguish between the two. It amplifies both. The same concentration of power that enables success also magnifies failure.
This is the paradox at the heart of Strongman rule. The traits that make it effective in moments of crisis are the same traits that make it unstable over time. The Strongman’s strength is inseparable from his danger.
Followers invariably convince themselves that their Strongman is the “good version.” But the qualities that make an effective Strongman are rarely those that make him a good man. More often than not, the search for meaning in concentrated power ends not in clarity, but in instability.
The Strongman offers meaning, speed, and results. What he cannot offer is stability. The problem is not that the benevolent Strongman cannot exist. It is that the system that produces him once—or even five times—cannot be trusted to do so again.
These people who look fondly on these tyrants do so from a collectivist mindset. Yes, many were brutalised and oppressed, but if the outcome was a victorious powerful nation that led to a cohesive society with purpose and meaning for the population, then obviously they would admire the strongman. An atomised alienated population is always discontent and yearns nostalgically for what had been.
If the strongman leads them to catastrophe and defeat, it’s a whole different story.