The Current - Fareed Zakaria on MAGA, Trump and backlash politics

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

The host of Fareed Zakaria GPS has a theory about the MAGA movement — it was probably inevitable. In his book Age of Revolutions, he argues that the kind of rapid technological and social change we���ve been experiencing over the past 30 years almost always leads to backlash. He spoke to Matt Galloway in front of a live audience at the Rotman School of Management.

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Join us. Because kids these days, we need you more than ever. Donate at GeoFoundation.com. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. For more than 15 years, he has hosted one of the most insightful global affairs shows on American television. Farid Zakaria GPS is known for giving voice to a range of perspectives from around the world. Farid is also a best-selling author, and his latest book, Age of Revolutions, looks at populist backlash movements throughout history.

That book was relevant when he published it just last year. but life moves quickly, and so he had to update it with a new chapter about the re-election of Donald Trump. I spoke with Fareed Zakaria on Tuesday in front of a sold-out audience at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. This is a timely conversation, and we're delighted to have you here in this moment to talk about the world that we're in right now. I mean, it's interesting because this book that you're here to discuss is something that you started thinking about, what, 12 years ago? That's right. Exactly. What was it at that moment that you want to explore?

Particularly, I mean, one of the impetus is looking at the rise of, for example, the Tea Party, what was going on there? What was it that got you thinking this would be an opportunity to dig into that? Yeah, and it was exactly that moment. So if you remember 2011, 12, 13, you have the rise of the Tea Party in the United States. And it struck me as the more I looked at it, the more I realized, is something very unusual happening because you were getting a bottom-up revote

not just against the Democrats. Of course they were against Obama, if you remember, and against Obamacare and all that. But it was a very, very vitriolic upsurge against the Republican Party itself and against the Republican establishment. And that's very unusual. You know, the Republican Party historically in the United States

has always been a very hierarchical party. The sort of line about, you know, how the parties chose their presidential candidates used to be that the Democrats fall in love. You know, if you think about Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, there's this, you know, this kind of swooning that the Democrats have to have. The Republicans fall in line. They just nominate the next guy on the left. I mean, this is a party that five times nominated Richard Nixon for its presidential or vice presidential ticket, right? four times nominated a member of the Bush family. No, five times nominated a member of the Bush family.

And then the more you looked at the Tea Party, you realized it was a kind of new politics because, and there was a very good Yale scholar, Theta Scotchpole, who went and spent time like a year and a half with these people. And she found that while they superficially talked about small government and, you know, said the things that you were supposed to say when she pressed them, all their concerns were cultural, that were about immigration, that were about gender norms, that were about

assimilation, that were about a feeling that whites had been discriminated against. So there was something kind of different going on here, and that got me to thinking, something is changing in our politics. It used to be a very simple array left versus right

over the economy. The left wanted more government, more spending, more regulation, more redistribution, the right wanted less. But something was changing. This was not the old spectrum, and that's where it all started. And so history doesn't repeat itself that it rhymes. Exactly.

How do you see, if you take a look at the MAGA movement right now, how do you understand what the architects of that movement are rebelling against? What are they fighting against? It's a great question. I think they're fighting against, and I spend a bunch of time with Steve Bannon more in the first Trump first term. And even though the guy is kind of crazy and as Jeremy had a very colorful career, he is kind of the ideologist of MAGA. He understands what is the internal DNA of it, perhaps better than almost anyone else.

Because Trump is kind of an odd, intuitive politician. He has a sense of all of this, but he himself is very mercurial. You know, one day he says, I hate China the other day. He's like Xi Jinping is my best friend. Right. So you can't find the ideological. load star from him. I think what people like Bannon would say is the mega movement is fundamentally a backlash against 30 to 40 years of movement in their view in the wrong

direction. You know the new spectrum I think is not left versus right on economics but open versus closed and for them it's been 30 years of too much openness too much openness to trade, too much openness to diversity, too much openness to multiculturalism, too much openness to immigration obviously, and even too much openness to big business and technology and a kind of full speed ahead model of society assuming that A, it can take all this change, and B, all this change is good. And so related to this is an anti-elitism. It's a great distrust of the elites. And if you think about, you know, the Iraq war, the global financial crisis, to a certain extent, COVID, you know, all of these were seen by people like that and

interpreted by people like that as the elites don't know what they're talking about. It's time to burn the whole house down. One of the things, and burn the whole house down is key. I mean, one of the things that you talk about in this book is that if it's globalization, many people have been made better off because of the effects of globalization. But that is, you in your words, secondary to one's self-worth, that the evisceration of one's status leads, do you understand that leads people to

want to burn the whole place down? Do you understand where that imposes comes from? Yeah, it took me a while because I'm a data guy and you look at the data, and it's clear, you know, the United States has actually done very well in this 30 or 40-year period. I mean, the simplest data I can give you

is, in roughly 2005, the Eurozone economy and the U.S. economy were about the same size. The U.S. economy is today twice the size of the Eurozone economy. When Brexit happened, Boris Johnson said that he was so sure that, you know, we didn't have to worry about the European market because Britain was going to get so close to the United States, it would be almost like it was the 51st state. Little did he know that the President Trump had other ideas for the 51st state. But if Boris Johnson's dream had to be a very first state, but if Boris Johnson's

dream had been fulfilled, and Great Britain would have become the 51st state of the Union. By per capita GDP, it would be the poorest state in America, poorer than Mississippi, poorer than Alabama. And here's the extraordinary thing. So would Canada, so would Germany, so would Japan. There was a fascinating story in the FT about how the manager of a car wash in Georgia today makes more money than the head of cyber security in Her Majesty's Treasury in London. So the real story, I guess what I'm trying to say is over the last 30 years

is that the U.S. has leaped forward of almost all advanced industrial countries. And yet? And yet, the story in these places is not that these people's livelihood has disappeared, they are on the dole, they are in terrible straits. Of course, there are people like that,

and J.D. Vance has made a career of describing in actually in very elegant terms what happened to Appalachia. But for the most part, and the data proves this, people still have jobs, they have new jobs, incomes have not gone down, you know, the United States is at one of the lowest unemployment rates in the last 50 years. The way I put it is, you know, their livelihood didn't go away, but their lives went away, by which I mean, if you go to a place, Youngstown, Ohio, they all worked in the steel plant. The steel plant is gone.

They probably went to Korea, if you want to put it metaphorically. They all worked together. They'd all go to church together. They'd all go to the bowling alley together. They'd all go to the Kiwanis Club together. They'd go to the hardware store together. There was a kind of community that had built around these industries and these factories. And that has all gone away.

Now, much of it has gone away not because of globalization. The reason they're not going to church as much as, you know, there's been a broader secularization of society. The reason they don't go to the hardware store is because Home Depot has made these hardware stores unviable. The reason that maybe they don't go to the movie theater is because of Netflix. You know, the reason they don't go to the bowling alley is because the whole bunch of men now do online gaming. But it's much easier to put the blame on something much more tangible. You know, and it became a kind of blame the elites, blame the immigrants, and that narrative is much more visceral.

You know, in my experience, people don't actually understand economics very well. But they, I mean, I hate to say this at a business school, but I can tell you from doing the show, it's like if you would actually poll people about what is the relationship between interest rates, inflation, they would have no idea. But what they do know is that their world is disappearing, you know, and what they are susceptible to is the argument from somebody

who says, I'm going to bring it back. You know, the most important word in Trump's slogan is, again, make America great again. Because it brings you back to some time when all this stuff wasn't happening. And the beauty of the slogan is you can each decide what that moment was when you were in the Garden of Eden.

It almost always is when you were, you know, when you were 12 and had the care of, you know, Nikki Haley once tweeted, wouldn't it be great to go back to when we were young and life was so much better and simpler? And so if you do the math, it's sort of like the 70s for Nikki Haley.

And you think to yourself, okay, in the United States, we lost the first war in American history, the Vietnam war. The president was about to be impeached and convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors and had to resign. Oil prices quadrupled. The economy was so bad they had to invent a new term

stagflation to describe bit and about a hundred American cities went through race riots and burning in crime and this was the glory days that she wanted to go back to but it's I think everyone has this nostalgia about some period in the past and what the right offers to a large extent is this is a politics of nostalgia this isn't a new story in some ways I mean the book when you're taking a look at revolutions you write that rapid changes in technology economics and identity almost always generate backlash that produces a new politics. Give us just briefly a history lesson. What happened in the Netherlands that would set this off? Well, you know, I began the

story in the Netherlands because it's really the beginning of modern politics. Before that, it was all courts and kings. And the Dutch created the first modern republic. And they invented globalization. And they invented finance. You know, the Dutch East India Company was the richest company in the world at its time. They spawned a whole kind of merchant class. that became the rulers of the Netherlands. And so it was the most forward-looking, most dynamic part of Europe, which is to say the most forward-looking dynamic part of the world. And inevitably, there was a backlash.

And there was a party that was formed that said, let's stop all this, this is too much change, it's too disruptive, it's sacrilegious, you're interfering with age-old traditions. We want to go back to before all this was happening. Let's make the Netherlands great again. And, you know, as you say, try to go through century after century where you see this. Probably the most vivid example that will sound very familiar to people is the late 19th and early 20th century. Because, you know, if there is a change that is of the magnitude that we have gone through with the information revolution and globalization,

it was probably that period, which people sometimes call the second industrial revolution. electricity, telegraph, trains, cars, the beginning of movies, completely disorienting what was largely an agricultural life and turning it into an urban, cosmopolitan, industrial life. And in that period, what happens is that politics of the period is completely upended, you know, the creation of communism and socialism and workers' parties and all that kind of thing. and then a right-wing response to it. And what's interesting is even in that period, what you see is that people's reactions when they face these kind of moments of deep, deep discombobulation, uncertainty, anxiety,

they tend to be more receptive to a message from the right culturally than a message from the left economically. Why do you think that is? I think it's that, you know, again, when you think your world is disappearing and somebody tells you I'll bring back the good old days

and I'll make sure that these terrible people who are upending your world we beat them up that's somehow more comforting it's more visceral I would say than the left which says I've got three policy programs for you

I've got universal day care I've got childcare we'll means test it and then we're going to give you coupons so that if you go to this place, you get health care. And there's something, you know, it's almost like the left responds with statistics, the right responds with stories. And emotion. And emotion, exactly.

And then if you look at the early 20th century, it gets nasty, where you see in places like Austria and Germany, really right-wing cultural figures see a huge revival. And don't forget, people look at, of course, the most extraordinary, ghastly part of it was the rise of anti-Semitism. It is all related to these changes, because what was happening is two things. One, you were having the shift towards an urban economy where finance and law and things like that are doing much better. Jews were more prominent in those areas because, of course, they had been disallowed by law for hundreds of years

from being involved in anything involving land or industry and things. So they've gone into the few pockets they had been allowed to. And secondly, there had been mass migration, particularly after World War I. And so there was an influx of people, just as there has been in the last 30 years. And it became very easy to demonize those people and say, they are the reason all these things are happening. So that period, in some ways, is the one I worry the most about because you can see how these forces are, as you say, history is not repeating itself,

but it's rhyming. But you can also see how fragile democracies were. I want to come back to the health such as it is of democracy. Can I ask you a little bit just about your own worldview and how you landed on it? I mean, anybody who watches your program on CNN or read your books knows that you have an outward perspective that I think is kind of uncommon on American television. You were born in India, you grew up there. How do you think that shaped how you see the world?

Oh, I think it shaped it very powerfully, and I agree with you. Look, I think what I have the ability to do, which is hard for Americans, is to see what the world looks like if you're not the 800-pound gorilla in the room, right? I mean, for most Americans, they're so comfortable in that world that they can't imagine what the world must look like to somebody else. I've often found even you go abroad and you're dealing with the ambassador, the State Department people, and there is this extraordinary, you know, assuming that the world

looks to the person in the small, in the poor African country the way it does to this country that has dominated the world for a hundred years that is the most powerful country militarily economically and so I've always felt like I have some sense

of what it was like not to be an American because I was born in that circumstance and I think I also have a sense of you know kind of what makes America special because again I've seen it I tell you a funny story which I'm okay I haven't told it before but it is true so it was my book the post-American world I went on in those days Sean Hannity of Fox News had a weekend show and he would

interview book authors and so for some bizarrely you know they said they wanted me on and so I went into do the interview and if I can be honest I'm not sure he had read the book and so he's beating around the bush and kind of coming, trying to get to, and then he finally looks at me and he says what I guess I'm trying to get to I just want to understand, Farid, do you love America? You know, because the title of the post-American

world, and as I say, the first line of the book is, this is not a book about the decline of America, but rather the rise of everyone else, and that was the thesis of the book. But, you know, maybe he didn't see that line. So he says to me, do you love America?

And I said, well, Sean, if you think about it, you're an American by accident. I'm an American by choice. I made a conscious decision to leave my country, my culture, my family, my friends, and come to America. So I think I'm demonstrating, by that act of volition and voluntary immigration, a very deep love for this country, whereas you just got lucky. When the interview aired, that part was edited out. Why did you go to the United States? You know, I'm a bad example of, you know, in general there are all these reasons why people emigrate,

and aggregate data would suggest, you know, India was a very poor country, America was a very rich country, in my days, still the gap is enormous. But I was always just fascinated by the world and international affairs and I loved reading stuff about what was going on in the world. I remember very well

because my mom was a journalist and she was the Sunday editor of the Times of India. They were excerpting Kissinger's memoirs and I remember that I was reading them because I told her I think you missed a really good section and I do the math now

and I was 14 years old. So obviously I was a very strange kid that I was reading Henry Kissinger's memoirs when I was 14. But I was always fascinated by that stuff. So then when given the opportunity to come to America to study, it was a cornucopia. And I got a scholarship to Yale. And when I got to Yale, I just felt like the world had opened up to me. And I fell in love with, you know, both Yale, but also America. And I've had an amazing experience in America. I've never had I've never thought I've had a moment

where people have ever treated me differently because I was Indian, had a funny name, had brown skin, all that stuff. My kids sometimes... It's never happened? Never. I mean, my kids tell me that I am obviously repressing all kinds of

all kinds of microaggressions that have taken place over the years. But I don't think so. I mean, I think, look, I was in New Haven, Connecticut, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York. Maybe if I had been in three days, other towns in different parts of America it would have been different. But

I really do think that there's an enormous generosity toward immigrants that most Americans have. I mean, this is why the tragedy of what is going on right now is one of America's great strengths is assimilating its immigrants. We should be cherishing this

because that's one thing that frankly, you know, European countries find it very hard to do. And a place like Canada and Britain have become much better at it, but it's, you know, you guys had to work at it. This was in America's DNA from the start. And we're sort of squandering this enormous competitive advantage we have, which, you know, the Chinese will never have, and the Indians will never have. Nobody else will have this in the, to the extent that the United

States has it, because it was born with this DNA. Kids these days, people say we have so much more, smartphones, video games, treats, and busy schedules. But more isn't always better. Because kids these days, we also have more health challenges than ever before. More mental health issues, more need for life-saving surgeries, and more complex needs. Chil has a plan to transform pediatric care for kids like me. Join us, because kids these days, we need you more than ever. Donate at GeoFoundation.com. At Desjardin, we speak business.

We speak equipment modernization. We're fluent in data digitization and expansion into forms. markets and we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes because at Desjardin business we speak the same language you do business so join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today we'd love to talk business what do you make of the fact that I mean and it's not just the United States you see in Britain and here in Canada public polling shows that the consensus that we are very proud of when it comes to immigration might be changing,

that people wonder, are we broadly letting too many people in? There are pressures on employment, on housing, for example. What is it like for you to see that conversation on immigration change? It depends on where it is, but in sharp ways. Part of the answer is that there is a broad backlash against all the things we discussed, right? And that is the reality, and immigration is the most visible form of all these trends. You've said that it could be a stand-in for all the changes associated with globalization. Right, because think about it, when you talk about global capital flows, nobody knows what that means.

You talk about even global trade flows. But the one global flow you can see, touch, feel is people, right? And then somebody comes in and he looks different and he sounds different and he worships different gods, that is very real. But the specific policy mistake that I think almost all advanced, countries made was on this issue of asylum. We allowed ourselves to let this sort of empathy of saying, when people say they're coming in for asylum, we have to treat it as if they are and we give them all the protections that they are, that, you know, we have believed in.

What's wrong with that? Because basically, nobody was willing to admit that there was, in effect, in every advanced society, a loophole which existed, which at all. allowed people to bypass the normal immigration process, if you were willing to utter the magic words, I have a credible fear of political persecution, political or religious persecution. And that program, when it was started,

would let in a few hundred people, then a few thousand people, became a program through which literally millions of people were coming in and applying for asylum. And if you looked at those people, the vast majority of them were obviously economic migrants who had realized, because they might be poor, they're not stupid, that the path to cut the line was to say that you were seeking asylum. And once you did, just to give you a sense in America what happens, you get in, no questions

asked, you get a court hearing and then a second court hearing, which are usually seven years apart. You cannot be deported in that period. Bizarrely, you're also not allowed to work in that period. So in some states, you get various kinds of protections and allowances. So the whole thing was almost like designed to create a backlash. What has happened is nobody was willing to look at the facts and say, guys, we've got to revamp the asylum system. We've got to create a much narrower track for people who are genuinely in fear of political persons. persecution or economic persecution. Everybody else, you're really just economic migrants.

And so the result is you've got millions of people coming on across the southern border. Not from Mexico, most people don't realize, but from Central America. You've got millions of people coming in from the Middle East, into Europe, and you got millions of people coming in from North Africa. And that broke the consensus on immigration in the Western world. Just the last point on this. What do you do about it? I mean, we were down on the southern border in Arizona with Mexico.

before the U.S. election, speaking with people, many of them first-generation Americans who supported the idea of a tighter border and were willing to vote for Donald Trump despite the fact that he said there would be this mass deportation, that enormous numbers of people and you're seeing that now. You're seeing people swept up or living in fear. What do we do about that? If the pendulum swung too far out and is now coming back, how do you correct for that in a reasonable way? I don't know. I think the most important thing is to fix it going forward that is to come up with a new asylum system

you just have to accept the reality no society like America you can take in a few thousand people maybe a few tens of thousands of people on the asylum track there has to be there have to be rules about how you do it you cannot incentivize people to just show up at the border what I'm heartened by

in the United States is there's still very strong support for immigration there's just not support for uncontrolled lawless immigration as I say, people cutting the line. You know, we take a million immigrants, legal immigrants a year in the United States. That's more than the rest of the G7 put together.

In a sense, the reason I want to reform the asylum system is I want to save the political support for this. And I think that's true in almost all these countries. If you don't deal with the obvious, uncontrolled, lawless element of it, you will find people turning on the legal part of it. Now, it is true that in the... In the MAGA coalition, there is a healthy part of the movement that is opposed to illegal immigration as well.

But so far it's in a minority. And I think that's going to be an interesting drama to see how it plays out, particularly post-Trump. Because Trump, I think, has been able to bridge these divides. But it may be that that starts to become stronger and stronger. People use a lot of different words to describe what's happening in the United States right now. And at the end of this book, having started it 12 years ago,

you try to reckon with what's going on under Trump. And you compare the United States under Trump, this is a book about revolutions, to the cultural revolution in China. Why? Well, because, firstly, it has a similarity in that it is such a full-scale effort to kind of attack, disrupt, disempower, and then replace the elites, elite institutions,

you know, if you think about the way the Trump administration is waging war on universities, on non-profits, on the internal bureaucracies that run so many of these departments, the EPA, the Department of Education, we've never seen anything like it. The only

attempt I can think of in recent history was Mao's effort similarly to really tear out root and branch the entire elite infrastructure of the Chinese system. They both, ironically, and I talk about this in the afterward, they both stemmed from a very similar place, which was Mao and Trump both felt they were being defeated by these forces, that the elite, and the, you know, if you think about Trump after January 6th, when Mitch McConnell comes out against him, when Kevin McCarthy comes out against him, when it seems as though he's going to be impeached for the second time, maybe even convicted, when his poll numbers start collapsing, when

businesses start distancing themselves from him when the PGA tour decides they're not going to use a Trump golf club who must have been the most deadly blow of all for Donald Trump and when you looked at the polling

Desantis is polling 30 points ahead of him that's when he decides what do I have I have the base I have the card ray I'm going to rally them and that is exactly why Mao was when he launched the Cultural Revolution and then he goes on this kind of almost wild

escapade of, you know, shutting down all of China's universities, having all the senior party leaders go to the countryside, in some cases for decades. So there's something similar there, but what worries me about it is I don't think Trump

seems, obviously, does not know his Chinese history, but doesn't know, again, how fragile. I mean, I think the thing I keep coming back to is how fragile institutions are. You know, they're just human beings. So when people say, well, we have these,

you know, people used to say, well, we have Congress as a check and balance. Well, Congress is just a bunch of people. And it turned out that they folded when Trump pushed them. Similarly, as you say, the courts, the courts are just people. And Trump is trying his best to intimidate

the Supreme Court right now. He's tried his best to intimidate the Fed. And in each of those cases, it's a person. So the question is really, is the, Supreme Court going to feel politically intimidated by Trump, who has been pushing as hard as he can, or is it going to say, no, we will stand up to him? How worried are you?

How about the future of American democracy? I'm worried, but I'm not, like, I'm not one of these people, and I respect them, who's going to, you know, move to Canada because they think America is about to become Nazi Germany. You're welcome here at any time. Thank you. I think what I worry about is the decay of America. democracy, the growing dysfunction, the fact that it will operate worse, you know, over the next

several decades because we have lost very important guardrails. But, you know, I have a good enough sense of history to know this is, you know, forgive you an example. What Trump is doing with the Department of Justice is terrible. The power of the state to investigate and to indict people is a very powerful force. It should be used very, very carefully. And in most Western countries, as you know, these things are, as in Canada, there are laws which separate that branch from the Prime Minister's office. In America, it is a tradition. It is a norm. And it's a norm that developed after Watergate. It's a norm that developed because of Nixon's abuse of power. And also, frankly, because it had not been, you know, people had not been that careful about it beforehand.

John F. Kennedy appointed his brother as Attorney General. So it's not as though, you know, I don't think there is a, there was, this was always some golden age. We've gone through ups and downs. This feels different, though. This feels different because we had set these norms. They were working well. The country was doing well. there was an expectation that these norms have solidified

and then to suddenly realize that one president comes in and whoosh, you know, you're back 50 years. That's the most jarring part. But I guess what I'm trying to say is, you know, to go back to the way the Department of Justice and the White House behaved in 1950 is not Nazi Germany. So I'm just trying to put some historical perspective on it.

Every time I see something like that, I think there is a tendency for people to start screaming, you know, this is authoritarianism. I'd rather use those words when it's actually happening. Do you understand why some people are pushing the panic button already? When they see masked men snatching people off the streets, when they see the president's family cashing in on cryptocurrency, that they think that those guardrails, whatever they were long past. Yeah, look, that's why they're hammering on that. Yeah, I understand. But let's take the corruption issue, right? very tough one. It seems to me

absolutely clear that this is very, very bad, you know, but... Very, very bad is doing a lot of work. But where in, what law is being broken here, you know? The president's children are grown men.

They have started companies. Foreign governments are in various ways, granting them favors. I mean, again, you see my point. These were norms. You just didn't do stuff like this. Would you be able to put a law in place that said, you know, you could, you have no member of your family is allowed to start a private business that does, you know, you can imagine the complexity of this. We live in free societies. We live in free economies. There was a, so to me, the most worrying part about this, and really probably the central worry, is why is, why is the country not rebelling?

what the Trump people are doing is to say look it can't be anything wrong with this because we're doing it out in the open we are telling you we are doing this we're celebrating these deals as we do them right so how can there's no we're not being furtive about this

and the stock market is roaring right but I look at that and say yeah you are being open about it and why are people okay with this why are people not saying why are people not rebelling why are people not saying you know this is really unconscionable that That's the puzzle.

The stock market is easier, as you know, it's a complicated... I mean, I've always been careful about making macroeconomic predictions in life because the macroeconomy, particularly in economy, the size of the United States, 30 trillion... It's huge, and you're talking about a thousand variable puzzle, right? And everybody would say, well, you do this one thing, tariffs, and it's going to have... Who the hell knows, right? Because there are 46 other things happening at the same time. And so, for example, oil prices went from 90 to 60 in the last six months or, you know, roughly.

Who knows how much of an effect that had, you know, on the Pard Plus side? And as everyone has pointed out, this AI spending is overwhelming everything. The danger of people have made with regard to Trump is almost all the things he has done economically, particularly these externally tariffs and such, have been bad. They've been bad for the economy. They're negative for economic growth. the negative for low inflation. But it doesn't mean you'll produce an immediate crisis, right?

Even the immigration stuff, the H-1B stuff, it's bad. You know, we benefit from having high-scale immigration. But will it cause a crisis tomorrow? No. What's more likely is it's a degradation of America's potential and growth. And that's the real, you know, that's the challenge. It's the, you know, the proverbial frog in the boiling water, which I know if they're a scientist here,

I know the frog would actually jump out, but we all, for some reason, use this metaphor because we have not been able to invent a better metaphor. What about the world? I mean, if he, and Steve Bannon told you, this is a revolution, what's happening right now. If the revolution that Trump is trying to enact when it comes to remaking the global order is successful,

what's the world going to look like, do you think? So at any one place where it's very, it's almost a global phenomenon and this is this sort of the elite versus the non-elite. One of the many changes that took place over the last 30 or 40 years and everyone in this room is a beneficiary of that change

is that we did create this new meritocracy. You know, we created a new global credential elite. We got rid of the old family and friends network and that group of people have become so powerful

and so dominant and so many places that there is a backlash. And you can see that in India. One of the things Modi plays off very much is that he's a simple man from the village. You look at Erdogan in Turkey. You look at the populist movements in Latin America. They all have that quality of being anti-the-elite. And that's a very powerful global phenomenon that I think we have to kind of digest and ask ourselves, what do you do about? Because by the way, structural forces continue to move in exactly this direction of post-industrial world post-industrial elite

the part that is less clear is how much the political force of populism is going to be as powerful in what will it mean immigration clearly everyone agrees all the populist parties but take something like trade the most hopeful sign that has taken place in the last six months in the last three months is that when Trump declared his trade war,

the European Union refused to go along. Even though they had threatened retaliatory tariffs, when it happened, they didn't slap retaliatory tariffs on because they said, we don't want to punish our people. If the Americans make a foolish decision, we're not going to mirror that decision, and we don't want to start a global trade war. And if you look around the world, including the Canada,

people have been remarkably careful. This is the big difference between Smoot-Hawley and today. The reason Smoot Hawley created so much of a kind of, you know, such a global problem is that almost every country retaliated. And you got into a kind of upward ratcheting which left the whole world in a kind of trade war. Now what's happened is most countries are doing what Mark Carney is doing. Treating the U.S. as the problem case that has to be dealt with on a kind of separate track. Meanwhile, actually trying to expand trade

with the rest of the world. Is that realistic for a country like Canada, which I mean literally you take a look at the border, is joined at the hip with the United States, but also so much of our trade is going back and forth and back and forth across the border. The Prime Minister has talked about that. There has been pushed from business

leaders to expand those markets. But is that realistic, do you think? No. In the short run, it's not. Look, he's saying the right thing and he's doing, he's putting on a very brave face, but you put it exactly right. The U.S. in Canada are joined at the hip and most importantly allowed themselves to be joined at the hip over the last 30 years. What my hope is, is that the United States will realize that there is simply no way for the United States to remain

competitive without maintaining this competitive ecosystem of that NAFTA created. And as you know, for the most part, it is still intact. My suspicion is, is that we will continue to go down that way, but it will have this effect which I worry about very much as an American, which is that it's rattled Canada,

it's shaken Canada's trust in America, it's shaken Canadian sense that there was goodwill on both sides, and it means that on the margin you are going to do more hedging than you have done in the past.

And I think that's true in Canada, that's true in Europe, that's true I tell you even in a place like Britain where they're thinking about China policy and they're now asking themselves which they never asked themselves before what would this look like if the US and we disagreed? How would we

go our independent path? What would we do? It's very clearly happening in India. So the whole thing, look, it's a catastrophic blunder from the point of view of the United States. It's the single biggest mistake that we have made, I think, geopolitically because as we face a world,

in which the dominant reality is that we have for the first time a peer competitor in China that operates at every level, economic, technological, military, diplomatic, political, and can operate worldwide and will operate worldwide soon. We have only one choice, which is to counter that with our great strength, our great force multiplier, which is our alliance system. You know, China has one treaty alliance. with North Korea. The United States has 50 treaty alliances. Instead of leaning into that, and by the way, our alliances are not with North Korea. They were the richest, most powerful,

most technologically advanced countries in the world. We should be cherishing them and leaning into them. Instead, we've created this absurd internal division within the ecosystem that we built over 75 years. So it's a catastrophic error. and I worry that it's not going to be that easy to mend because once you put this kind of distrust in people you know our nationalism, our hypernationalism is sowing the seeds for a certain nationalism in other countries as well and you're empowering the people and they exist in every country

you say you know we need to be looking out for ourselves we need to be clear we need to be sure we understand what Canada's specific self-interest is, India's specific self-interest is, and the beauty of the American ecosystem was we had created a kind of win-win idea which is being lost.

Do you see a counter-narrative developing in your country? I mean, you wrote a piece in the post about how the Democrats need to learn how to win again in some ways. There are people who will point to what happened. You live in New York City, the new mayor of New York. Zoran Mandani is the future if not that party, then certainly

of a way to approach the affordability. question, for example. Do you see a counter-narrative developing in the United States? Look, in the long run, I'm sure of it, which is to say, in the long run, look at the last three or four hundred years, right?

The people advocating the backlash have not won the debate. We move forward. We modernize. We open up. And if you ask yourself, what is the big story politically of the last three or 400 years? It's a great greater rights, you know, more openness, more, one way, a simple way to think about it is this.

Look at the party platforms of the German social democrats and the German conservatives in 1900 or 1910, right? What were the German social democrats in favor of? They were in favor of limiting the working hours for people in factories, no child labor, greater unemployment, health care. Women should be given equal rights, including the vote, income taxes should be higher, safety nets should be larger, right? That was the German social democratic program. The conservatives were, you know, retained the monarchy, retained the authority of the church, retained the aristocracy and aristocratic privileges in some form or the other.

Then it became, it sort of morphed to a kind of laissez-faireism, the rights of corporations, no income. tax and so you see what I mean like the world has moved in the direction of liberalism broadly construed but it produces a lot of backlash and it produces a lot of you know so the wave is there but there are a lot of under toes so I do believe that over time you will see you know think about on something like immigration we're gonna learn to live together we are we're already all multicultural societies you can't change that right and so it's going to be a question of how we come to terms with it, how we find ways to live together,

and how we find ways to live with people who come from places that historically were not part of what Canadian culture was originally built on. And it's true and it's disruptive, but guess what, there's no going back. And I think most people are comfortable with that. In the short term, the problem is it's very easy for emotion to win over reason. It's very easy for the fear to take over compared to hope. The extraordinary thing about Mamdani, I think, was he found a way to be, you know, to be hopeful, to tap into people's emotions, to tap into the sense of the joy of campaigning. You know, there's some of this has to, it has to be, there has to be, you have to get people

at the gut. You have to, you know, again, I think the left tends to try too hard to get people at the brain. And maybe he's right that you signal these big, simple ideas, even though they're kind of unworkable. If you look at the details, they're not that easy to figure out how would you pay for it and what would be, you know. But, you know, you think Trump thinks about that when he campaigns, right? So maybe you're fighting fire with fire and you have to find a way to get people excited, to get them to fall in love again rather than fall in line. These are complicated times, and we need interpreters to help us understand what's going on. You are one of the best.

It's a real pleasure to speak with you. Thank you very much. Thank you, so much, Matt. Breed Zakaria, everybody. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Recorded live at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. That's my conversation with Freed Zakaria of CNN.

His latest book is Age of Revolution's Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the present. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.