Pulitzer Prize-winning author M. Gessen told a full house at Haverford College on Thursday, Sept. 17, that American institutions weaken themselves by yielding to authoritarian pressure.
"Time and time again, institutions learn that one concession leads to a bigger demand," Gessen said during the 90-minute talk in Marshall Auditorium, Roberts Hall.
The event, titled "Politics of the Past and Politics of the Future," was part of Haverford's Distinguished Visitors Program. It was a joint presentation of the Michael B. Kim Institute for Ethical Inquiry and Leadership, the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, Haverford College Libraries, and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, according to the college.
Gessen, a New York Times opinion columnist, won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Opinion Writing and has authored 11 nonfiction books on authoritarianism. Jill Stauffer, associate professor of peace, justice, and human rights and co-director of the Kim Institute, introduced Gessen after outlining the institute's 2026-27 theme: AI and Democracy. That theme explores the ethical and political implications of artificial intelligence alongside the state of democracy in the U.S. and abroad, according to the Kim Institute.
Zainab Saleh, associate professor of anthropology and Koshland Director of the Hurford Center, moderated the conversation. She opened by asking Gessen to revisit a passage from their 2020 book Surviving Autocracy, in which they argued that Donald Trump was not an exception but the "logical consequence" of centuries of American structural inequality.
Gessen pointed instead to Sept. 11, 2001. The nation had marked the 25th anniversary of the attacks just six days before the talk. The surveillance infrastructure and "fortress under siege" mentality that followed, Gessen said, laid the groundwork for rhetoric about invasion and enemies that no longer sounds extreme.
Gessen singled out colleges, universities and law firms, arguing those institutions have made self-defeating choices by negotiating with the current administration rather than taking a stand.
The conversation also turned to a recent New York Times piece in which Gessen drew parallels between Kansas' revocation of driver's licenses for people who had changed the gender marker and a 1935 Nazi-era law requiring Jewish Germans to adopt identifying middle names. Gessen called the Kansas policy "an open act of denationalization" that serves the same aim as the 1935 law.
On the Democratic Party, Gessen called its post-2024 approach "wishy-washy," criticizing its adoption of Trump-era language on immigration and its retreat from trans rights advocacy. Only "future-oriented, hopeful politics" can counter autocrats, they said.
The evening closed with about 20 minutes of audience questions covering the psychology of authoritarianism, the disappearance of local news and whether the U.S. is exhibiting traits of a declining empire. Gessen said the autocratic playbook varies little across Russia, Hungary, Turkey and Israel: attack the media, courts and universities while rewriting the past to justify power in the present.
In July 2024, a Russian court convicted Gessen in absentia and sentenced them to eight years in prison on charges of spreading what the government called false information about the Russian military's actions in Ukraine. Gessen ended the Haverford talk on Russia, their country of origin, saying the nation has twice had the chance to move "from a story of greatness to a story of goodness" and failed both times.
