3 Takeaways - Fareed Zakaria Makes Sense of a Crazy World (#209)

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

Massive, mind scrambling changes are taking place in society and politics these days. Nobody makes more sense of it than Fareed Zakaria. Listen, as he talks with his typical brilliance about the problems with our political parties, the need for open markets, how to fix the U.S. Supreme Court — and why he believes enormous optimism is justified. 

Massive changes in information technology, globalization, economics, and other factors are dramatically disrupting our world. How are our societies and our politics being reshaped? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Fareed Zakaria. Fareed is the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a best-selling author. He's the author of five New York Times best-selling books, and his most recent book, which is wonderful,

is Age of Revolutions. Age of Revolutions examines how four revolutions in economics, technology, identity, and geopolitics are dramatically disrupting and reshaping our world. It's one of the most important books for anyone trying to understand our society and our politics today. As Fareed says, and I quote, one sign of a revolutionary age is that politics gets scrambled along new lines, unquote. I'm looking forward to finding out what those new lines are and if what's happening in the U.S. is part of a broader trend in the world today. Welcome, Fareed, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today.

It's a huge pleasure to be with you. Thank you for asking me. It is really my pleasure. Thank you. Farid, you have said that a profound insight from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is that when people get more insecure, they tend to move not to the left, which wants to spend more money on the issue or problem, but to the right on culture. Can you comment on that? And do you think that's what's happening now? Yeah. I mean, if you think about what we've been going through over the last few decades, you know, enormous changes in terms of the massive expansion of globalization,

the steady rise of immigration to the levels that we've never seen before, except in the late 19th century. If you think about the information revolution, how it's transformed work so that people who work with their hands become much less valuable and people who work with their minds become much more valuable to the market economy. All this produces a great deal of change, a great deal of uncertainty, great great deal of uncertainty, a great deal of flux in the world. One might think that people will say, well, move left because, you know, people are going to offer me programs, assistance, tax credits, retraining, whatever.

But what it does psychologically is make people feel my world is going away. The world I grew up in is going away. And I want that world back. And the right appeals to that kind of cultural nostalgia. You know, it's not an accident that Donald Trump's slogan is make America great again. The most important word on that cap is again. It's a promise to take you back

to before your world was upended by all these forces. And in a way, that's a much more deeply satisfying idea and feeling than somebody saying, well, you know, the world is changing a lot. You can't do much about that. But here are three programs I've come up with that will help you adjust to this world. A left-right divide has long dominated the political landscape where the left, as you've been alluding to, has traditionally been for a bigger government with more regulation and more redistribution of income, and the right has been for smaller government, a freer market with less governmental intervention. Is that left-right division fading? It's fading fast. Think about the transformation of the Republican Party. Under Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party was for free markets, free trade, small government. Reagan even talked about

balanced budgets, so he never achieved it. Promotion of democracy abroad, very benign attitude towards immigration. He signed the 86th Amnesty Act. Compare that to Donald Trump. Trump is in favor of protectionism, high tariffs. He's not a particular advocate of small government. He actually wants to expand Social Security and Medicare. If you listen to him in terms of almost any of these issues, he's almost the opposite of Reagan. So I think we've already seen a substantial transformation. And it's likely to endure because the parties are now rooted in two different bases. The Republicans are the kind of white working class base and the Democrats in an educated plus minority base. Many of Trump's campaign speeches you've written can be boiled down to four lines.

The Chinese are taking away your factories. The Mexicans are taking away your jobs. The Muslims are trying to kill you. I will beat them all up and make America great again. You've talked about a perspective of open versus closed. How do you see that from the perspective of open versus closed? Or are you seeing that in a different paradigm? No, it's very much the same. And in a sense, if you think about what those four lines represent, they all have this feeling of a kind of reaction or position to change,

to modernization. And it's sometimes an honorable position. I don't mean to say it's always wrong, but it's basically saying, stop the world, I want to get off, or at least slow down the world, I want to get off. It's this idea that there's too much globalization, there's too much immigration, there's too much multiculturalism, and let's slow it all down. And that's at the heart of Trump's appeal. Is Trump alone in breaking with traditional right ideology, or is he part of a broader trend? Very much part of a broader trend. Look at the right in Britain.

The right in Britain came out of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, free markets, free trade, again, libertarianism. And now what they embrace more than anything else is Brexit. Brexit is fundamentally against free markets and free trade because it's saying Britain had free trade with the European Union. And what the conservatives said was, no, we don't want free trade. We want obstacles, blocks, barriers, because we want to regain our political sovereignty, our political control. If you think about the way in which Boris Johnson has approached his prime ministership, big spending, big deficits, very much not the position traditionally of the Tory party. If you look at Georgia Maloney in Italy, she's anti-immigrant, skeptical of the European Union. If you look at Giorgia Maloney in Italy, she's anti-immigrant, skeptical of the European Union.

If you look at the way in which the Dutch right has been moving, you know, the Swedish right, all of them seem motivated by these cultural issues. And for all of them, it's not an accident. Immigration is issue number one, because immigration, in a sense, is the kind of human face of globalization. Movements of capital and goods and services, these are all abstractions. But the movement of people, you can see, you can feel, and that visceral reaction to the guy or the woman who comes to your town, who looks different, who sounds different, who worships different gods, that becomes the locus of the new cultural conservatism. One of the trends you've identified that is reordering Western societies and politics

is the rise of identity politics and the growing polarization that is accompanied it. Can you comment on that? I think it comes in a strange sense out of success or out of wealth. In the late 1940s, the big challenge for most of the Western world was creating a mass middle class, lifting the working class out of abject poverty. People forget, but countries like Italy were very poor, even in 1945, 46, 47. That's why, by the way, you had so much immigration from Italy into the United States for the first half of the 20th century. And what happened in the 50s and 60s was that you achieved this great goal of really broadly lifting up the population

so that their economic needs were no longer at the center of their political identity. And then, you know, if you remember the great sociologist Maslow, who talks about a hierarchy of values, as people moved above basic survival, shelter, food, clothing, they started to identify their political views or identity with what are often called post-material values or expressive values. And those are, who am I really? How do I think of myself? I think of myself as a man, a woman, somebody who's Black, somebody who's Hispanic, somebody who's gay, somebody who's Jewish. And those identities started to take on a larger and larger role. And that happened on the left, we all know, with the civil rights movement. But people forget it also happened on the right.

People started to say, I am a white Christian, and I feel that my rights are not being taken into account. So this became a politics of dueling identities, which is where we are today. You've talked a bit about economics and post-World War II. Back in the 90s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a consensus around free markets and trade. What's happened to that, and how do you see the markets and trade? I think the important thing to remember in that period is that it produced enormous wealth around the world. I mean, over that 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989 onwards, probably 500 million people have been raised out of poverty in the world. And poverty, we're talking about people living on a dollar a day. So this is an enormous achievement of that

era of globalization and free markets and free trade. That number of people being raised out of poverty is greater than the number in the preceding century, 100 years. So we achieved a lot. The United States actually has done very well in this period. We have the largest economy in the world. We are by far the dominant economy technologically. The dollar is the reserve currency of the world. There are all kinds of measures by which the United States does very well. But the gains were not distributed equally. Basically, to put it very simply, people with a college education in America have done very well over the last 30 years. People without any college education, much less well. People in the coasts and the big cities have done very well.

People in the rural areas of America, not so well. And that division, that disparity, has been at the heart of the reaction. If you look at not just the United States, but say France, you see that the opposition to Macron and the support for the far-right, what used to be called the far-right party, the National Front, is largest in the rural areas, among the less educated, among the more religious, and among the more white and less multicultural. So, it's a broad phenomenon, but it centers on this idea that the world, these 30 years have gone well for certain people, but not so well for others. So because of that reaction, there is a broad skepticism now about free markets and free trade that there wasn't 30 years ago. You see the rise of protectionism everywhere.

The United States now has the highest tariffs it's had since the 1930s. But even countries like China, which gained all their wealth because of free trade, are themselves turning inwards. Xi Jinping talks about his made-in-China strategy, which is fundamentally protectionist. The trouble is, it's very hard to get growth out of protectionism and out of limitations on markets. We've tried this experiment. I grew up in a country, India, that believed it could grow its way with high tariff walls

and protecting its own industry. And it was a recipe for slow growth and enormous corruption because the political class gets empowered. You know, who gets tariffs imposed on which sector, who gets empowered. Who gets tariffs imposed on which sector? Who gets licenses? Who gets waivers? All that becomes a kind of political discussion. The challenge going forward is going to be everybody wants growth, but people are skeptical of markets and free trade. And yet that's the best, fastest, strongest way we know to get growth. I suspect that we're going to go through this

experiment with protectionism. And a lot of countries are going to realize that at the end of the day, it's a road that leads nowhere. Switching tacks a bit, how do you see the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S.? Are they weakened shells? Fundamentally, we have done something very strange to our political parties. We took away their primary function. The primary function of every political party is to choose a candidate. The secondary function, you could say, is choose a platform and then raise money around it. We've really taken most of those functions away from the parties. The primary system means that the 10% that is most

extreme, most engaged in each party chooses the candidate. That, by the way, is a unique system. No other advanced democracy in the world does it this way. And every other democracy, the party, through some internal means, chooses the candidate and then presents it to you for the election. We have an election before we have the election. And what does that mean? That means that the party elders, party officials, senior party members lose power, and party activists, extremists, you know, the people on Twitter and the people who go to primaries, they gain power. The people I mentioned, the party elders tend to be mainstream. They're politicians. They've been elected by broad constituencies.

They represent, in a sense, the center of the political spectrum. The people who vote in primaries tend to represent the extreme. So it's been a very bad trade that we've made. And it means that the party is really now a shell, as you say, within which political entrepreneurs act. And if you can raise the money and you can gain attention, you become important. Give you one example. In the old days, the way you became prominent as a congressperson was you gained expertise, you went on big committees,

you gained legislative achievements, and that made you famous. Today, the way you become famous is you go on Twitter, you go on cable TV, you raise money and that becomes your fundraising mechanism. And so you have people like AOC and Matt Goetz on either side, neither of whom have any legislative accomplishments to them. But they are great on Twitter. They're great on social media. Those are the stars of the Republican and Democratic Party.

It is shocking to me the difference in candidates for the top job that other countries, as you say, select candidates who have been known for a long time, who've been active in their parties, have served on committees or served as ministers or cabinet members. And they're well known. And the U.S., we seemingly, every election, have new candidates with very limited experience in government. You're right. You talk about people like AOC. And if you look at some of our past presidents, some are governors who've never held a federal government position like Carter, Clinton and Bush 43. Some have briefly served in the Senate like JFK and Obama, and others have never held a government position such as Trump. It's fascinating to me to compare the U.S. to other countries or just to compare countries. Yeah, social media actually exaggerates this phenomenon now because, you know, if you think of 10% of the Democratic or 10% of the Republican Party being primary voters and then being more extreme, the people who are active on Twitter,

who nowadays often kind of set the agenda, that's 10% of the 10%. So you've suddenly skewed even more. What are some other ways that the U.S. is different compared to other countries? Well, the most important way is the Electoral College right now. If you look back over the last 25 years, since 2000, the Republican Party has won the popular vote one time in 25 years. In 2004, George W. Bush's re-election. Every other time, the Republican lost the popular vote, but many times became president. Bush in 2000, Trump. And that reality is sort of jarring when you think about it, because what does it mean? It means that millions and millions of voters in America are effectively disenfranchised. If you're a voter in New York

or California or Illinois and you vote Republican or Democratic, it makes no difference because the state is, you know which direction it's going to go. And by the way, the same is true, say, in the Deep South, where if you're a Democratic voter, it has no meaning because those votes don't count. The states are going to go Republican. You know, it's a winner-take-all system. So even if the state goes 51-49 Republican, that state gives 100% of its electoral votes to the Republican. So it's fundamentally undemocratic in my view, because it means that you are not representing the votes of millions and millions of people. There's no other system I know of that wastes votes or does not allow the votes of people

to be expressed in political choices. And how about the Supreme Court nomination process in the U.S.? Oh, that is completely unique at this point. We are the worst in the world, if I can be completely blunt. There's no other system where the appointments are as nakedly political as it is in America now. And by the way, all these other countries learned from America that they should have an independent Supreme Court. The U.S. was the first to have an independent Supreme Court with judicial review. But now the way a typical democracy, advanced democracy does it, there's usually some kind of

fairly complex process by which a Supreme Court judge is appointed. There tends to be perhaps a panel of legal experts. There are some politicians on it, but a lot of independent legal experts on it. They will propose a series of people. That process then has to be ratified by the legislature in some way or the other. It's all designed to actually produce people at the center or people who are less partisan and less politically oriented. In our case, we actually accentuate the politics of it all. These positions are seen as kind of gifts of the president, and then the Senate has to ratify, and it's done entirely on party lines. And the other big difference is we are the only country in the world, the only country in the world where the Supreme Court has people with lifetime tenure.

That seems to me, frankly, a crazy idea, particularly given that we're living in an age where, as has been fairly apparent in the last few months, people can be very old, they can suffer cognitive decline, and they can, frankly, think about all the old people we know. People do get set in their ways. They become less flexible in their thinking. And the idea that you're going to have more and more people like set in their ways. They become less flexible in their thinking. And the idea that you're going to have more and more people like that in their 70s, 80s and 90s on the Supreme Court is frankly a scary idea. Oh, it's so scary. And it also raises the stakes when each appointment can be for 40 or 45 years. Yes. And what people do now on both sides is they look for young people who have quiet

political and legal backgrounds where it's difficult to tell exactly what they would do. And they'll stay for 30, 40 years. You're exactly right. There's talk now about Supreme Court reform. And to my mind, the single most important reform would be to do something like, I don't know, 15-year terms or something like that, or a mandatory retirement at 75. I think a 15-year term is a wonderful idea. 15 years is a long time to serve. I think it also allows for churn and new perspectives and new people. I mean, the country changes and this one institution feels like a kind of medieval aristocracy. It does. Farid, how do you think that the U.S. has changed in the last 10 or 15 years? Let me do first the last 30 years, since I came here, what is it, 35 years. Broadly speaking, it's a much better country. It's much more open, much more flexible, much more dynamic,

much more vigorous in many ways. When I look back on the country I came into, it was a little bit more rigid. You know, it's one of the great things about America. It's a very dynamic place for most people, women, minority backgrounds, people who are gay, anyone who had, you know, who was not part of the kind of absolute mainstream, straight, white been a backlash to all the things I described. And I think that backlash is real. And I think it's understandable in some ways. You know, it's a lot of change for people to digest. But I don't think the backlash is so strong that it has negated what I just described. You know, I think that we had a big wave forward, and there is now an undertow.

But don't mistake the undertow for the wave. We are still moving forward. Farid, it has been a great pleasure for me to read all of your columns and watch all of your videos in preparation for today's conversation. And one of the interesting facts that I learned from your writings was that 15 years ago, that the United States and the Eurozone were roughly similar in size. And today that the American economy is nearly double that of the European Union, and that average European income is nearly 30% lower than the US. Yeah, it's an extraordinary reality that we don't realize how well we've done in this world of globalization and information technology and all these things.

We dominate that world. And because there have been unequal gains and because the people who have not benefited as much politically, very important because of where they sit geographically in the Middle West, in these swing states, I think our political system has reacted more strongly to the losers in this game than the winners. And by the way, I believe the losers should be looked after, compensated, retrained. All the things that we should be doing that we haven't done is very real. But it is sometimes easy then to forget the enormous gains we've made.

They're just striking compared to the rest of the world, especially since Americans, at least at this point, seem to have lost confidence in our country and the strength of our economy. The candidate that usually wins in an American election is the more optimistic candidate. Think of Kennedy, Clinton, Obama. 2016 was a break. Donald Trump was clearly the more pessimistic candidate. And again, he won only the electoral college and he lost the popular vote, but he did win. And it tells you something about the mood in America. It does. It does.

Let's very briefly talk about successful strategies. Looking around the world, what do you see as the most successful countries and strategies and why? Fundamentally, if you're trying to get yourself out of poverty, which is the struggle for most countries, it seems that the three things that have mattered the most are to have high levels of education, particularly female education, high levels of savings so that you have money to invest, and a broad openness to free markets and free trade. This is, I'd say, generally speaking,

the conclusions I drew from a very important World Bank report that looked at East Asia, looked at countries like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong. And the reason that I think this is striking is because those countries actually had very different macroeconomic strategies. Some had a lot of industrial policy. Some were very free market. Some had a particular kind of state involvement. That wasn't the key. The key is all of them had the three factors I mentioned. And I think that that's not a bad, simple set of rules to have. Try to encourage education. Try to encourage savings so that you have money to invest for the future and have a broad hospitality to markets and trade. So interesting.

What are the three takeaways that you would like to leave the audience with today? One, that we are living through extraordinarily revolutionary times, that we should understand that. That when we look at all the things going on and people do feel disoriented, disrupted, you're right. It's true. There's an enormous amount of change that's taking place. So that's point number one. Two, don't be surprised that there's a backlash. Don't be surprised that people find this overwhelming. That is part and parcel of the historical process of moving forward. going right in the world. Enormous advances in technology that are going to help us with our health. They are going to allow us to solve problems that we've never been able to solve using new techniques. I mean, think about it. We're expanding the power of our minds using artificial intelligence in a way human beings have never been able to do. We're moving in an extraordinary positive direction. And by the way, the most

important reason to be optimistic is no pessimist ever got anything done. You have to believe you can, and then you will. I love that optimism. Farid, thank you. Thank you for our conversation today. Thank you for your wonderful GPS show, your columns and the age of revolutions, which are all wonderful. Thank you so much. It's my pleasure. This was such an interesting, stimulating conversation. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at threetakeaways.com where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram,

and Facebook. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.