Stephen Kotkin: commitment

Transcript context

…They know that there are enemies out there. They know that this process has people who are against it. That's a given. Who are the people who are against it? They're masking their true feelings. They're hiding behind professions of loyalty. When in fact, when the hour of crisis comes and there's a war, they will be the saboteurs behind the lines, the fifth column. It might be that some of them are innocent that you're arresting, but some of them are clearly going to be guilty as well. To get the guilty, you have to somehow manage to deal with victimizing people who are likely innocent and you may know are innocent. But you also know to your bone marrow that some people out there are enemies. It's hard to identify and find them. So you're overcompensating a little bit to make sure that you get every last enemy. Again, it's a crazy idea to us. It makes no sense to us, but a lot of things make no sense that people believe in. There's this young kid who's really adept at social media who just looks like he won the primary for Democratic candidate for mayor in New York City. One of the things he wants to do is freeze rents, rent control, because he wants more affordable housing. He's a complete idiot in terms of facts, because the way to get more affordable housing is to build more housing. If supply massively increases and it exceeds demand, the price has to go down. It's proven again and again and again. What rent control does, or freezing of rent, it inhibits the building of new housing. Because who's going to build new housing when you can't make money off of it? So rent control is what produces the lack of affordable housing in the first place. He sees what's the problem as the solution now. Now, is he a fool? No, he's a really bright guy. He's very well-educated. He's read everything and anything. He's been to university. He's talked to a lot of really smart people. You'd say, “how could he be so foolish to believe an idea that's obviously falsified by empirical reality?” But again, it's an ideological belief. He wants to allow people who can't afford Manhattan to live there. That's a good idea. Life should be more affordable. There should be more places like Queens, where you can come in as immigrants or you can come in as lower class, front end of the social ladder, like my family did for example. My father worked in a factory. You should be able to get some housing for your family, work hard, and rise up. I agree with that 100%. But he's got an ideological approach to how to achieve that, which to me is completely foolish. If I were as smart as him… how could he possibly hold that idea in his head? But ideology is pervasive. It's pervasive, flying in the face of empirical reality. We could give many examples. I'm not picking on this guy in New York. It's just a recent example. I don't know him. I've never met him. Whatever. Maybe there's a more complicated story there. reality. We could give many examples. I'm not picking on this guy in New York. It's just a recent example. I don't know him. I've never met him. Whatever. Maybe there's a more complicated story there. I'm just saying that we have to take ideology seriously because it's deep and it can be enduring even in the face of empirical reality. There's ideology, but there's a very specific thing to these Marxist regimes. They might believe in class conflict and that you need this revolution and so forth. But there's also this sense that you cannot contradict the party, you cannot contradict the vanguard. Even in 1924, when Trotsky is getting condemned by the party, or whatever that was, he gets up to give a speech to the Party Plenum, and he says, “Look, for all of my thoughts, let there be no mistake that the party is always right and party discipline is always important.” So there's not only the sense where Mamdani would say, “Oh, I want these specific policies implemented” but there's also the sense that loyalty to the party, and eventually to Stalin even when it seems to contradict my understanding of socialism, is absolutely paramount. One way to explain that is that they were just genuinely afraid of Stalin and they thought this was antithetical to their understanding of communism. Another is that part of the ideology is this theocratic understanding that the party's always right, even if it seems like a single individual is manipulating it to their ends.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.