Tom
Pepinsky

Tom Pepinsky woke up on January 6, 2017 - the day of the first Trump inauguration - and published an essay. It was not long. It was not decorated with graphs or footnotes. It said something that most American readers had never considered: that authoritarianism, when it arrives, does not arrive in jackboots and spotlights. It arrives quietly, through paperwork and compliance and the low hum of ordinary life continuing exactly as normal.

"Life in authoritarian states is mostly boring and tolerable," he wrote. "You go to work, you eat your lunch, you go home to your family." The essay spread. It appeared at Vox. It circulated on social media by the millions. Political scientists, journalists, and anxious citizens shared it with the message: read this. He had seen this before - not in America, but in Malaysia and Indonesia, where he had spent years studying what authoritarianism actually looks like from the inside.

This is what makes Tom Pepinsky unusual among political scientists. He did not bring a theory of authoritarianism to Southeast Asia and look for confirmation. He went to Southeast Asia and built the theory from the ground up, in the field, in Indonesian, from data that most of his American colleagues couldn't read. When American democracy started showing familiar symptoms in 2016, he had the comparative material ready.

Pepinsky's academic path traces a particular kind of intellectual ambition. He arrived at Brown University in the late 1990s and left with a double degree in Linguistics and International Relations - two fields that, in combination, signal something: a deep interest in how language and power intersect, how meaning is constructed, how one group explains itself to another. From Brown, he went to Yale for his Ph.D. in Political Science, finishing in 2007.

After a brief year at the University of Colorado Boulder, he joined Cornell in 2008. The fit was obvious - Cornell has one of the strongest Southeast Asia programs in the world, and Pepinsky's research on Indonesia and Malaysia placed him at the center of it. He is now Director of the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP), Director of Cornell's International Political Economy Program, and holds a joint appointment at the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.

In 2021, he became the inaugural holder of the Walter F. LaFeber Professorship - a named chair honoring the Cornell historian famous for his critical analyses of American foreign policy. The appointment was a statement. Pepinsky's work, which applies comparative lenses to American institutions with unflinching candor, sits squarely in that tradition of speaking uncomfortable truths to power.

His reach extends well beyond Ithaca. Since 2018, he has been a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution's Foreign Policy Program and Center for Asia Policy Studies. Since 2022, he has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of East Asian Studies, which he led to full Open Access in 2025. He is also co-founder of the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) and past president of the American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

The story of how one political science blog post became a reference text for a generation of worried Americans is worth telling carefully. On January 6, 2017 - the day of Donald Trump's first inauguration - Pepinsky posted a short essay on his personal website, which he had maintained since 2004. The essay drew on his decade of research on authoritarian governance in Southeast Asia to make a simple but counterintuitive argument.

Americans, he wrote, imagined authoritarianism as something that looked like the movies: dramatic arrests, uniformed thugs, sudden violence, a before and after. But that was not what authoritarianism looks like in the countries where Pepinsky had done his fieldwork. In Malaysia under Mahathir. In Indonesia under Suharto. Authoritarianism there looked like bureaucracy working normally, like people going to work and paying their bills and watching football on television. The machinery of oppression operates in the background. Most people never touch it.

"The experience of authoritarianism is in many ways similar to normal political life," he wrote. "Elections happen. Businesses operate. People go to the movies." The horror, he explained, was not constant terror. It was normality itself. The danger was that Americans, expecting drama, would miss the slow erosion until it was too late.

The essay was shared by academics, journalists, political operatives, and ordinary readers alike. Vox republished it. It accumulated hundreds of thousands of readers. It became, in a specific political moment, a kind of instruction manual for what to watch for. Eight years later, in February 2025, Pepinsky published a sequel: "Everyday Authoritarianism is Maddening and Stupid." His thesis had evolved. The boring-and-tolerable stage, he now argued, had given way to something noisier and more erratic - but the underlying mechanism was the same.

When COVID-19 arrived in 2020, Pepinsky did what political scientists do: he ran a survey. Then he ran it five more times over the following year. The result was one of the most rigorous academic assessments of how partisan identity shaped pandemic behavior in the United States - and the findings were damning.

Working with Shana Kushner Gadarian and Sara Wallace Goodman, Pepinsky tracked how Trump supporters and Biden supporters diverged in their approaches to mask-wearing, social distancing, vaccination, and basic public health information. The divergence was not modest. Trump support - not partisan identity per se, but specifically Trump support - predicted health behavior with striking consistency. "Pandemic Politics," published by Princeton University Press in 2022, transformed panel data into a case study in how political leadership shapes life-and-death outcomes.

The work continued. A 2024 paper in Public Opinion Quarterly, again with Gadarian and Goodman, updated the findings: Trump support continued to predict COVID-19 health behaviors in the United States even as the pandemic receded. The relationship had been established. The causal mechanism was partisan identity, amplified and weaponized by political leadership that chose to treat a public health crisis as a culture war.

To understand Tom Pepinsky's work on American democracy, you first have to understand his work on Indonesian and Malaysian democracy. He spent years in the field. He learned Indonesian fluently - a significant commitment for an American political scientist - and built research networks across the archipelago. The result was a body of scholarship that challenged some of the most comfortable assumptions in comparative politics.

His 2009 book on economic crises and authoritarian regimes asked why some authoritarian governments survive financial crises while others collapse. Indonesia fell in 1998 during the Asian financial crisis. Malaysia, under Mahathir Mohamad, survived the same crisis. Pepinsky's argument turned on what he called "cross-border asset specificity": whether the economic elites whose support the regime depended on had assets tied to the domestic economy or assets they could move internationally. When elites can move their money, they have options. When they can't, they stick with the regime.

His 2018 book with R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani challenged the assumption that Muslim piety drives political behavior. Using original survey data from Indonesia - the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy - they showed that individual piety, measured carefully, does not predict how Indonesian Muslims vote, what economic policies they support, or how they relate to political Islam. The book was described as "a model of problem-driven, data-rich political science."

Both books share the same intellectual signature: Pepinsky does not start with a theory and find data that fits. He starts with a puzzle - why did this country behave this way? - and builds the theory from the bottom up. It is an approach that produces surprising results, which is the point.

Most academics discover Substack in 2021. Tom Pepinsky started blogging in August 2004. At that point, social media barely existed. Facebook was a few months old and restricted to college students. Twitter was still two years away. Pepinsky was writing for an audience of approximately nobody, on a platform most of his colleagues didn't know existed, about Southeast Asian comparative politics.

That commitment to public writing has been a constant. The blog accumulated a genuine readership over the years. His 2017 authoritarianism essay became its signature piece. When Substack emerged as the dominant platform for serious newsletter writing, Pepinsky formalized the arrangement: in February 2025, he launched "Tom Pepinsky" on Substack, moving his two-decade archive into a new format while keeping the same editorial instincts.

The newsletter covers comparative politics and political economy, with particular attention to democratic backsliding, Southeast Asian politics, and U.S. institutions. It also ranges further: cryptocurrency and political economy, AI and social science research practice, the credibility revolution in political science, and the ongoing tension between area studies and comparative politics methodology. He writes with the kind of specificity that comes from deep expertise, and the kind of accessibility that comes from long practice writing for non-specialists.

The November 2024 essay "Living Through the Next American Political Order" - published the day after the election results became clear - circulated widely. Its central argument: that electoral authoritarian regimes work not through terror but through institutional compliance. "The institutions will comply," he wrote, "rendering us complicit even through nonaction, without our consent." It was the 2017 essay's darker sibling, written now with the evidence to back it up.