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2026 UC Davis Lunn Lecture: Autocracy, Inc. — or Democrats United?
All 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 national and transnational networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services, 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.
The 2026 Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture at UC Davis features Pulitzer prize-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum, who will examine the networks that make up today's autocracies and describe how they have shaped the world - and the United States.
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for the Atlantic and Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Her previous books include the Pulitzer-prize winning Gulag: A History; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. She has been a columnist and member of the Editorial Board at the Washington Post, as well as Foreign and Deputy Editor at the Spectator, and writes for many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Criterion and The Guardian.
The Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture commemorates Eugene Lunn, a member of the UC Davis Department of History who distinguished himself as an incisive scholar and beloved teacher in the field of modern European intellectual history. In his memory, a fund was created to support an annual lecture series bringing notable speakers to campus to address significant cultural issues from a historical perspective.
This event is organized by the UC Davis Department of History and co-sponsored by the Lunn & Gatoff families, Pi Sigma Alpha - Delta Upsilon and individual donors.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3418726-0
