So it turns out that the figure of the “strongman” is ascendant once again in contemporary history. Putin in Russia, Xi Ping in China, Kim (Jong Un) in North Korea, Erdogan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Mohammed (bin Salman) in Saudi Arabia, Bukele in El Salvador.
And of course Trump here in the United States as a kind of wannabe dictator who openly admires others on that list and often muses on dreams of becoming one of them.
What unites all these men is a fierce desire to govern by the exertion of their own will, along with disdain for the rules and constraints of popular opinion, legal review, and the legislative grind.
Insecurity and fear cause us to run for cover—and hope there’s someone there who’s big and strong and has massive caches of food and warm beds on offer till the danger passes.
They and other men of lesser visibility on the international stage comprise a wholly informal wall of dictatorial pushback to what was supposed to be the previous millennium’s new world order that emerged from the rubble of the Berlin Wall, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, and the rejection of Maoist communism in favor of a hybrid capitalism in China.
In observing this now fairly entrenched development over the past few years, I got to wondering if there is a female equivalent of the very word “strongman.”
Seems it would stand to reason, given that females can’t be completely devoid of dictatorial yearnings, can they?
When I googled “female dictators,” it referred me back to historical figures ranging from Catherine the Great (18th century), the wives of mid-to-late 20th century male dictators (Eva and Isabel Perón in Argentina, Jiang Qing aka “Madame Mao” in China), and Indira Gandhi in India, who was first elected in 1966, deposed in 1977, elected again in 1980, and assassinated in 1984. Most all the years of her tenure were marked by dictatorial “states of emergency” and corruption.
None of these figures, however, are current, which is notable in itself, given the rise of male dictators in today’s world.
And none are referred to as “strongwomen.” Turns out that term is reserved in modern lexicon for female athletes in strength sports such as weightlifting and for various commercial ventures, rather than for a generic class of female dictators akin to the world’s “strongmen.”
“Strong women,” of course, abound, but the “strongmen” of our era have their own moniker to reinforce the image that they are a breed unto themselves.
And if we look back into religious history, “unto gods.”
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One can’t behold this seeming retreat into patriarchal dominance across the international stage without noting its deep roots in the very beginnings of humankind.
Brawny men in prehistoric caves having their way with lessers in the struggle for survival that none other than Trump’s chief domestic strategist Stephen Miller recently cited as a rationale for seizing Greenland.
That virtual god-like power of the strong forming the basis for the very beginnings of religious thought.
To the primitive mind—and to the primitive parts that yet live in our own mind—those endowed with the most raw physical power on earth surely serve as manifestations of the divine power that sends thunderbolts from the sky but also the seeds and fruits and rapidly multiplying prey of spring.
Since that raw power has always existed much more prevalently in men, it follows that the religions eventually emerging from humankind would be dominated by them.
“Lean on me,” these would-be man-gods have been proclaiming ever since. And in the words of one of them: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” *
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We see more than mere vestiges of this man-god power exerted across the world’s religions today, some 300,000 years after homo sapiens arrived on the world stage in Africa and began contemplating their plight in an often dangerous, most always inexplicable-at-the-time world. Some 290,000 of those years had to pass before what we think of as religion today began the long process of codifying reasons for the world’s existence and ascribing those reasons to gods and supreme beings.
Who have always, by lopsided margins, been regarded as male.
Some statistics culled from various denominational sources highlight the staying power of that imagery:
- Percentage of Roman Catholicism’s 400,000 priests (representing 1.5 billion practitioners) who are female: 0%.
- Protestant denominations’ female ministers worldwide: 15%.
- Judaism: Approaching female parity in the Reform movement, 25% in Conservative congregations, 0% in Orthodox.
- Islam: Lacks formal ministerial credentialing; females can serve as teachers and scholars, and can lead other women in prayer in a kind of circumscribed status of imam if no men are present. But women leading men in prayer is not consonant with standard Islamic practice.
Let’s see: male gods and their mostly male clergy continue to dominate religions worldwide, and males also perform an outsized role in governments all around the globe. What a coincidence.
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The obvious, gnawing question that comes from this radically condensed survey of political and religious history: Is there something in the human psyche, structural, evolutionary or otherwise—that clings still to hopes of a strong father figure who can salve our wounds and offer us a ticket to redemption, whether religious, political, or both?
Do we secretly, in our heart of hearts, carry dreams of deliverance by the powerful hand of dominant personalities with deep voices and a Y chromosome who accrue supreme power and then dole out favors to those who have remained obedient and stayed out of their way?
Is that the kind of leader, priest and president we still think we need?
And why would that be, given the strides that females have made in cultures worldwide over the past century, riding a modern feminist wave which, despite its seemingly limited scope in the statistics cited above, still amounts to an unprecedented set of gains in overall power and influence?
For possible answers to those questions, we should give psychology a stint at the lectern.
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A May, 2025 article in the journal “Evolution and Human Behavior” sports 36 names in the author credits, a fact that as an editor makes my head hurt but which speaks to the exhaustive, multi-country work its authors-researchers undertook to address the question that its condensed newsletter summary framed as follows: “Why We Keep Choosing Strongmen As Leaders.”
The answer was provided in the full article: “Cross-cultural evidence that intergroup conflict heightens preferences for dominant leaders: A 25-country study.”
In it, the authors reflect on findings from sets of questionnaires offered to 5,008 study participants across countries ranging from the U.S. to Chile, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, Kenya, Lebanon, Israel, Greece, and 15 others. The subjects were offered scenarios relating to the basic circumstance in their countries, from peace to war to a point in between. They were then asked to respond to questions on their preference for leaders to guide them in those times, using subtly doctored photos of faces skewed from gentle to dominant. The researchers’ distinctive finding as summarized in the newsletter:
“The results were clear and consistent across cultures: participants exposed to war scenarios significantly preferred more dominant-looking leaders. Importantly, we didn’t stop there. We also assessed participants’ explicit preferences for leader traits, revealing that during conflicts, dominance traits—like toughness, strength, and assertiveness—were prioritized over warmth and even competence.“
Furthermore:
“One might wonder whether these preferences were culturally determined or universally innate. Our comprehensive dataset—encompassing affluent democracies, developing nations, Western and non-Western societies—supports universality. Even with educational and economic diversity between the sampled countries, the conflict-driven preference for dominance was remarkably consistent. This suggests an innate basis for our leadership psychology that transcends cultural boundaries.”
This strikes me as in line with basic human psychology, though it is good to see it confirmed in experimental research settings. Namely, that insecurity and fear cause us to run for cover—and hope there’s someone there who’s big and strong and has massive caches of food and warm beds on offer till the danger passes.
This has also been the not-so-secret sauce that demagogues have always used to seize and retain control of populations even if it is initially through free and fairly conducted elections. Cite some existential fear—a “secret” communist/socialist plot to overthrow the government, a terrorist attack, an invading horde of immigrants out to destroy your way of life, even compulsory public health directives during a pandemic—then stoke even more fear with ginned up anecdotes or outright lies denoting ever greater danger.
Rinse, lie, evade, incite, repeat.
The result is all too often a population’s flight to perceived safety that ends in the dictators installing loyalist cronies ill-suited to their positions but who help him seize and solidify his hold on the key levers of power, after which they raid the treasury and lead their country into wars, ruin or both. This is Putin’s story almost to the letter, and it is one Trump is trying very hard to finish writing.
Is this just a human cycle we are all doomed to repeat until doomsday? Sometimes it feels that way, but it is a bad and useless place to be stuck.
And here’s why…
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The safety we seek in strongmen and the “strongods” they reflect and try to emulate is a delusion. There is no safety for anyone in dictarorship—even including a strongman’s inner circle who must warily eye each other, always alert and suspicious that treachery and betrayal could wreak havoc at any moment. (They are right…)
And we need only look to history for evidence of how dismally strongmen’s countries have performed. The wrecked economies (kleptocracies, actually) they leave behind, the crushing of dissent, the wars upon wars they engage in to keep their people fearful, but which ultimately leave them maimed and dispirited, if not dead.
None of this is a call to disarmament or minimizing the hard fact that we live in an imperfect, often dangerous world. But the failure of aggressive, muscular strongmen-dictators to bring about true security is so colossal, of such sustained historical scope, that it feels almost shocking that we—meaning humanity at large and we Americans, too—keep falling for it.
The fact that voters did so again in 2024 is dismal but not altogether surprising, given the clear evidence of the history, psychology and theology cited above. And it is all the more dismal given that so much of President Trump’s support continues to come from the evangelical Christian world, whose voters have made him into the exact kind of idol their tradition explicitly and repeatedly warns against.
Trump himself delights in adding fuel to that fire by pumping out via his social media accounts the bizarre—let’s just call it “deranged”—imagery we see above.
Yes, the irony of the Christian tradition’s central figure being a poor barefoot carpenter preaching non-violence, non-idolatry and humility is completely lost on him (which we would suspect), but truly, his ostensibly devout Christian followers would know better were they to take their scripture seriously.
Yes, the more things change, the more they come around again and again, to slightly bastardize the old maxim. History tends to evolve in recurrent cycles, bending toward justice in one, autocracy in another. Meaning this cycle and the lessons it carries will very likely (hopefully!) be moving along in due time as well.
And Lord Almighty, it just can’t come fast enough.
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* The words are Donald Trump’s, from an address to the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2024
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Angela Chan-Danisi, an advisor to international business executives wrote in Forbes, “Women who move quickly are labeled impatient. Those who speak plainly are called abrasive. Women who leave misaligned roles are labeled difficult. Those who maintain authority are told to adjust their tone.” Men who possess these same qualities are hit with adjectives like strong, forceful, and no-nonsense. However, these strong, forceful and no-nonsense XY-chromosomers are responsible for 99.9% of the wars that have plagued mankind for some 300,000 years. Perhaps this world would do better with XX-chromosomers in leadership roles. That discussion is for another
The recent rise of dictatorships is chilling. It too closely mimics the world almost a century ago in the aftermath of World War I. H.G. Wells referred to it as “the war to end all wars.” Obviously, he overrated mankind’s ability to overcome its flaws. In his science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, written twenty-years before World War I, Martians invade the Earth and initially decimate all in their path. The Martians are eventually defeated; pathogens do the aliens in. A fatal case of immunodeficiency saves Earth. Unfortunately, we now find ourselves under attack from a force within, seemingly immune to humanity. Wells concluded that while the Martians were defeated this time the world must be ever vigilant or the Martians may return and win.
I’ve had women tell me over the years, jokingly (I think…) to be careful what I wish for when I start grousing about what men have done with this world of ours, but my general sense is we are long overdue to give them a try at running things. But jeez, coming up on 250 years now and the best we’ve managed is a couple of major (losing) presidential candidates?