Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is what I wanted to ask you about. You had the de Tocqueville quote about how revolutions happen when governments start to institute some kind of reform. Gorbachev is doing perestroika, glasnost. There’s the conservative reactionary parts of the Communist Party, which by the way is a phrase I wouldn’t expect to have said. But they’re trying to resist this. So Gorbachev goes about dismantling the party secretariat and instead devolving power down to the individual republics. We know what happens later. These republics are saying, “Look, we want our own country now.” But this raises a question. If you do inherit a brutal regime, and now you say, “I want to do reforms.” You know this dynamic that de Tocqueville pointed out, which is that as soon as you start reforms, actually what tends to happen is that you lose power, not that people consolidate it under you. What actually should you do? Because you’re like, “I want to improve people’s lives.” But as soon as you try to do that, the whole thing’s going to fall apart. This is so far above my pay grade. I’m a professor. I have trouble justifying a B+ on a paper. I’m a believer in gradual reforms. Do it incrementally. For the Soviet Union, it would be gradual legal reforms, work it through their Duma slowly, and do it that way. But seek out help from the European Union that has many, many experts that would be overjoyed if Putin and friends would cease doing their number on Ukraine. Now the problem is you’re going to get into reparations for the horrors they’ve inflicted. So that ship has sadly sailed for this generation. There’s no nice ending for Russians. It’s too late. But you can look at Europe itself improving its institutions and Ukraine improving its institutions. If you think about what forces you to change, the existential threat on Ukraine, if they survive all this, this is forcing them really to clean up their institutions. So it’s happening rapidly there, but we don’t know the end of that story, how it ends. I do think these are interesting lessons here of whenever we look at a country from the outside, we have this thing of, “Well, just reform everything and just fix your economy.” Whenever we understand the system better… For example, in the United States, healthcare is 20% of GDP. This idea that Trump or Obama or Biden, whoever, could just come in and be like, “Well, I’ll just fix healthcare.” We recognize that this is a wildly implausible thing to happen. But then we have this expectation that in Russia, Gorbachev or Yeltsin could have just been like, “100% of my economy is messed up, and I’m just going to fix it.”…

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