Professor Jeffrey Kopstein's presentation built on his recent book, "The Assault on the State", co-authored with Stephen Hanson. Seeing how governments during the Covid pandemic had struggled to adopt public health policies at a time when they were critically needed, Kopstein said, the book was intended as a defense of the modern state. "The state is like the air we breathe", he said: Something we only notice when it fails.

He highlighted the deep-rooted attack on the state, often framed through conspiracy theories like the "deep state" narrative. Steve Bannon's push to destroy the administrative state was one example of this ideology, which links libertarians, religious or cultural nationalists, and executive power advocates. While these three groups share their distrust of modern administrative government, they are unlikely to find much else in common: "The irony is that if any of them came to power, they would hurt the others." Leaders like Donald Trump, however, managed to appeal to all three.

Although such attacks on the state are widely discussed, Kopstein noted that dividing the world into democracy versus autocracy is a relatively new phenomenon that has emerged only after World War II. Many indices indicating that democracy is under threat would misuse the term "populism". Kopstein suggested the key issue was not populism but patrimonialism, where power is based on personal loyalty and emotional ties rather than legal structures. This governance style has historically involved delegating authority to friends and family, a stark contrast to modern bureaucratic states.

Instead of looking only at whether a regime is autocratic or democratic, Kopstein suggested an additional axis that also divides regimes into bureaucratic and patrimonial. Such a typology recognizes that regimes can be democratically elected and still be patrimonial in nature. Examples include Brazil, the Philippines, and Donald Trump's MAGA movement in the U.S.

Examples of regimes that are both autocratic and patrimonial include Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. Russia, for example, had faced market chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union, leading to disillusionment with liberal democracy and fueling a return to a more centralized, patrimonial state. Russian President Vladimir Putin had positioned himself as the father of the nation. Former Soviet Union countries with weak state institutions, such as Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya, proved fertile ground for Putin to impose his model of governance. Ukraine, however, had resisted this patrimonial model, leading to Russia's invasion following the failure of pro-Russian forces to assert power after the Euromaidan protests.

Far from being an exclusively Eastern European phenomenon, Kopstein briefly discussed the patrimonial dismantling of state institutions also in the U.S. under Donald Trump and in Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu. Characteristics of such regimes would typically include the promotion of the leader's friends and family to government positions, attacks on state officials and the judiciary as "unelected bureaucrats" allegedly in league with shadowy forces, and the subordination of higher education institutions that might intellectually challenge the leader.

To combat the rise of patrimonialism, Kopstein emphasized the need to strengthen rule-of-law institutions. He concluded by warning that while we can debate state institutions, the need for a functioning state should never be in question.

hosted by Professor Eugene Finkel


Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, antisemitism, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society, paying special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history. These interests are central topics in his latest books, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust(Cornell University Press, 2018) and Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust(Cornell University Press, 2023). His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the US Fulbright Scholar Program, and the United States Department of Defense. In 2021–2022 he was the Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.