Defund, Co-opt, Replace: How Authoritarians Reshape Culture (Frontlines) #3

🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: culture — where authoritarian power doesn’t just silence dissent, but reshapes the institutions that decide what gets staged, funded, and celebrated.

In this episode, we speak with Piotr Rudzki (dramaturg; formerly of the Polski Theater in Wrocław) and Kristóf Nagy (anthropologist; author of an ethnography of the Hungarian Academy of Arts) about how cultural worlds are reorganized under illiberal rule.

• Why is defunding today’s most effective form of censorship?
• How does co-optation work through grants and patronage?
• What do terms like “culture war,” “cultural takeover,” and “hegemony” clarify—and what do they obscure?
• And where can autonomy still be built: underground, inside institutions, or through collective organization?

🎧 To find out, tune into This Authoritarian Life, Season 2, Episode 3 — Defund, Co-opt, Replace: How Authoritarians Reshape Culture, with Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Episode Teaser & Jingle
• 1:01 Introduction: The Cultural Frontline
• 2:40 Meet the Guests: Piotr & Kristóf
• 6:13 The Polski Theater in Wrocław: Building a Public Stage
• 12:36 The Takeover of the Polski Theater by Authoritarian Conservatives
• 19:03 Short on Loyalists: The Cadre Bottleneck in Illiberal Hungary
• 23:14 Is the goal a “New Man”? Two Takes on Culture as Engineering
• 34:29 Governing Through Patronage: The Hungarian Academy of Arts as a Co-optation Machine
• 44:52 Spaces of Autonomy and Solidarity
• 52:33 Closing Reflections
• 57:05 Acknowledgements