Many of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services  — military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance — and professional propagandists. They don’t share an ideology, but they do have a common goal: to defeat the ideas and language of liberal democracy, inside their own countries and around the world.

This lecture will examine this network, and describe how it has shaped the world — and the United States. Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and leading public intellectual focused on authoritarianism, democracy and modern political history. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of award-winning and bestselling books including Gulag, Red Famine, Twilight of Democracy, and Autocracy, Inc.

A reception follows the lecture.

Co-Sponsored by the UC Davis History Department, Pi Sigma Alpha - Delta Upsilon, and the Manetti Shrem Museum. With generous support from the Lunn Family and the public.