In 1941, as Allied bombs fell on Italy and Benito Mussolini plunged his country further into war, the young Italian filmmaker Alberto Lattuada explained how 20 years of fascist rule had led to catastrophe.
“The absence of love brought many tragedies that might have been averted,” Lattuada wrote. “Instead of the golden rain of love, a black cloak of indifference fell upon the people. And so people have lost the eyes of love and can no longer see clearly. … Here are the origins of the disintegration of all values and the destruction and sterilization of conscience: It is a long chain that is anchored at the devil’s feet.”
Love seems scarce again today as autocracy spreads across the globe, and our vision is veiled by the fog of disinformation and the heat of enmity. Authoritarian leaders seek to break bonds of solidarity among those they govern, replacing them with intimidation and hostility. Former President Trump, who aspires to join their ranks, has followed a similar playbook to make America’s emotional and social climate propitious for autocracy.
But love remains a potent anti-authoritarian force. In Turkey, Poland and elsewhere, democratic activists and politicians have turned back tyranny by making love a central part of their strategies. Along with joy and optimism, hallmarks of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, love can sustain an American pro-democracy movement too.
Love is an act as well as a feeling, as bell hooks observed. It galvanizes us to stand up for our rights and advocate for a politics of equity, justice, transparency and solidarity. Love supports resistance to autocracy in places where freedom has been lost, and it can help endangered democracies like ours reverse course.
Autocrats often use emotion for political purposes, evoking fear, contempt and disgust to define groups by exclusion. Trump has encouraged Americans to exchange kindness and empathy for hostility and callousness. “Part of the problem,” Trump said when security guards treated protesters at a 2016 rally too gently for him, “is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.”
Trump’s recent depictions of immigrants as blood-polluting invaders and his political opponents as “vermin” continue to cultivate cruelty among his base. The rage of the civilian army he instigated to assault the Capitol, the surge of hate crimes and the escalating threats against public officials, including assassination attempts against Trump himself, suggest millions of Americans now consider violence a legitimate response to political differences. Fascist repression relied on similar beliefs.
Yet I believe the United States is ripe for a heart-centered mass movement. A national campaign that explicitly elevates solidarity, kindness, tolerance and empathy as core values of a multiracial democracy — and presents policies grounded in care and compassion — is likely to resonate with many voters.
Love could act as a bonding agent, creating the unity that is key to successful pro-democracy movements. It could bring faith leaders, civil rights activists and patriots into a dynamic coalition. Slogans such as “Make America Love Again” could compete with the far right’s formidable propaganda apparatus. Love would draw in people bored by dry policy debates and help disenchanted voters reconnect with politics.
Those who resist authoritarianism know love’s power to bring about change. Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition candidate in the 2019 Istanbul mayoral race, made “radical love” the centerpiece of his winning campaign against a candidate backed by Turkey’s autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “We had two simple rules,” said Imamoglu’s campaign manager, Ates Ilyas Bassoy. “Ignore Erdogan, and love those who love Erdogan.”
Imamoglu, an observant Muslim with liberal views, eschewed mass rallies and negative messages, walking the streets and “engaging people directly, no matter what their ideology,” he recounted. Hugging voters in cafes, mosques and parks, he established connection and trust.
Three years later, Imamoglu was sentenced to more than two years in prison to ensure that he could not run as the opposition’s presidential candidate. He was allowed to run for reelection as mayor and won.
Love and optimism have also buoyed pro-democracy campaigns in Eastern Europe. “We love, we can, we’ll win” became the slogan of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s 2020 challenge to the Belarusian despot Alexander Lukashenko. Love carried Poland’s opposition Civic Coalition to victory last year. The campaign attracted young voters in particular by promising to liberalize laws on abortion — which Poland almost totally banned in 2021 — but Poles of all ages donned heart logos as they turned out in record numbers for a March of a Million Hearts.
“When I see this sea of hearts, I can sense that a breakthrough moment is coming in the history of our homeland,” opposition leader Donald Tusk, now Poland’s prime minister, told the rally. The feeling fueled the country’s greatest voter turnout since 1989, ending eight years of far-right rule.
Americans can find parallel examples in our own history. Civil rights leaders certainly knew that love can seem like a flimsy weapon against brute oppression: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that he once “despaired of the power of love in solving social problems.” Then he heard Howard University President Mordecai Wyatt Johnson’s lecture on Mahatma Gandhi, whose conceptions of nonviolent protest as a “love-force,” along with Christian love, animated a transformative movement.
“Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate,” King wrote, echoing the language Lattuada used to describe enmity’s ripple effects under Mussolini. “This can only be done by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.”
Il Duce once told a journalist the secret of his success: “Keep your heart a desert.” Today’s strongmen, including Trump, embrace the same bleak outlook. It’s our turn to prove them wrong by cutting the chain of hate and reaching out to others with “eyes of love.”
The joy of the Harris campaign has given Americans much-needed positive momentum, but love can be the transcendent, unifying concept that motivates mass participation. Love insists that we are precious beings who deserve leaders who respect us and promote our well-being, not tyrants who deceive, rob, jail and kill us. We already know what hate can do; it’s time to harness the immense power of love.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.”