Desire for a strongman is really a symptom of an underlying strategy that appears to be both instinctive and almost catastrophically stupid - power concentration. Based on arguing with lots of them, people generally respond to a crisis by trying to build the biggest club they can, then hitting their problem with it.

This has terrible results in politics - usually the target is wrong because our information about what is happening society-wide is so poor, and the club usually hangs around for someone corrupt to wield. Pretty consistently the correct response is dialog, tolerance and decentralising power. Good luck getting anyone to listen to "time for dialog, tolerance and decentralising power!" when they think there is a crisis. They want to club something, with a bigger club than got used the last time.

The big lessons out of the communists is that there is a level of power concentration where once it occurs there will be a lot of unnecessary deaths and suffering. Don't let that happen. In particular, let farmers run their farms to produce as much food as they like. There have been too many examples of people bringing the big club down on the farmers business then mass starvation (I'm thinking Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Communist Russia and Communist China when I say that, but I'm sure there are countless other examples).