"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 59

Episode 59: The Rise, and Maybe Downfall, of Liberal Democracy

Veteran journalist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria has made a career of putting hard questions to many of the world's most powerful people. Taking the temperature of global politics these days, he’s worried democracy is on a dangerous downward slide. He explains why — and where — leaders are taking their countries down dark paths, and what can be done to rescue democracy as we know it.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

###

Fareed Zakaria: I've been writing, talking on TV for 25 years. I've had a certain amount of nasty stuff said about me, particularly on social media.

My CNN colleague, Fareed Zakaria, has been the most prominent Muslim journalist on American televisions for more than two decades. At times that's made him an obvious target for bigotry.

Fareed Zakaria: The two moments where it really flared up were after 9/11, was the first one. People looked at me as a Muslim and, okay, some of that happened.

But Fareed says that burst of hatred was short-lived — thanks to a gesture from the White House.

Fareed Zakaria: It turned very quickly because the president of the United States, George Bush — whatever his flaws — was extraordinarily good about saying this is not about Islam. Islam is a good religion.

Peter Bergen: He famously visited the mosque in Washington, D.C.

Fareed Zakaria: Visited the mosque days after, or something like that, 9/11.

ARCHIVAL George W. Bush: The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.

Fareed Zakaria: It made a huge difference. It brought the temperature down.

Then, Donald J. Trump came along…

Fareed Zakaria: The second time was 2015, 2016 when Trump was running. And Trump did exactly the opposite. He inflamed everybody. There wasn't even a 9/11, but he started to talk about how Islam is a religion of violence. They hate us. I'm going to ban them all. The Muslim ban all that.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We have to be extremely careful with radical Islamic terrorism. And we have to look at the Muslims and we have to do something. We cannot stand by and be the stupid people while our country is destroyed.

Fareed Zakaria: If you judge by the number of personal, nasty attacks I got, you know, on Twitter, on social media, calls to my house… my daughters were young then and they got scared out of their wits. And, there was a question of whether or not I needed security and all that just because a presidential candidate decided to, in a sense, give people permission to be nasty, to be bigoted. You know, we all have within us — I think — a dark side and other sides. And leaders can bring out the best in you or they can bring out the worst.

These days, a lot of leaders are bringing out the worst. Around the world, politicians are whipping up people’s hatred, anger, and resentment — and they’re using it to take down the-powers-that-be. They’re going after the establishment thathas run much of the world for decades. For Fareed, Trump is just the American face of that global backlash.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: In Argentina, a chainsaw-wielding outsider has won their presidential election.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: A politician dubbed the Dutch Donald Trump winning the Netherlands parliamentary elections in a massive landslide…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Italians have chosen their first far-right government since World War II.

Fareed Zakaria: They all have one thing in common. They're against the establishment.

What’s so worrying to Fareed is that in most of these countries, the establishment is liberal democracy — a system he believes has brought the world unparalleled safety, prosperity, and freedom.

Fareed Zakaria: Clearly, the very fact that it was, it's happening all over the world at the same time tells you that there is a demand for a certain kind of revolt, a certain backlash. This is not a flash in the pan.

[THEME MUSIC PICKS UP]

He’s spent most of the past decade trying to figure out why people would want to topple that system. And he’s written an excellent, deeply-researched book about what he learned — it’s called Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. It's about the long rise — and maybe the coming downfall — of liberal democracy.

Fareed Zakaria: We're now getting a new breed of leaders who are telling us they know the answer and who are telling us, you know, we don't like all these constraints, all these checks and balances. It's a bad road.

I'll ask Fareed why — and where — liberal democracy is under threat, why he thinks it’s always been more vulnerable than we realize, and what can be done to shore up the system that Fareed argues has made life so much better for so many of us.

I'm Peter Bergen. And this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Peter Bergen: Your book covers half a half a millennium. You have a very busy day job. In fact, day jobs, plural. Your CNN show, Washington Post op-eds, CNN pieces, CNN documentaries. So how did you kind of go about writing this book? And what's your process?

Fareed Zakaria: It was very hard. This was probably the hardest book that I wrote. It took me 10 years. I did write two books along the way. And as you say, you know, put out a show every week and a column every week and all that. My biggest problem is I'd start work on Monday at like 6 a.m. and have to stop at 8 a.m., And then the next day I would… You know, it took me a while to get my juices flowing. And I had to find a way around that. One of the tricks I learned was from reading an interview with Ernest Hemingway, who said whenever you're writing and you're on a roll, uh, and you know you're going to stop, don't stop when you finish writing everything you have to say. Stop one paragraph before that. Because the hardest thing to do is to get going…

Peter Bergen: Oh well that’s a good…

Fareed Zakaria: …and the next day when you get up and you have to get going, you already have your first paragraph and I would sometimes scribble it in a, in a quick, you know, couple of key words. And that second day then starts with some propulsion and you can kind of keep moving. So, I had all kinds of little tricks like that, because, I know this sounds weird, but thinking is the hardest thing to do. Reading is easy. Researching is easy. But the thinking which allows you to construct a narrative is the hardest thing.

Peter Bergen: You've mentioned 6 a.m., and I, I think there's a reason that people often write in the morning, because I think your subconscious has been working on the book in your head while you've been sleeping.

Fareed Zakaria: That's a very interesting idea. Yeah, I think you're right.

Peter Bergen: Yeah, I really feel that very strongly. I, I, get up as early as I can and start writing.

Fareed Zakaria: It's so interesting you say that. I find that, that early in the morning, you're right, that you've been thinking cogitating and it's been sitting in your head all night. And it somehow comes out much, much better and much more fluently, actually.

In his new book, Fareed skillfully compresses a lot of history to tell the story of the rise of liberal democracies, and he emphasizes that there was a lot of luck along the way to make that happen.

I talked to Fareed mostly about what’s happening in the world right now, but his book really starts back in the sixteenth century.

[VAGUELY BAROQUE MUSIC PICKS UP]

Fareed describes how, on the water-logged plains of the Netherlands, the Dutch banded together to save their land from the encroaching seas. Thanks to these very particular circumstances, the Dutch created something that looked quite different from the feudal regimes around them: a tax-based society that built dykes to keep back the rising waters.

This in turn helped create an entrepreneurial social order that was far more equal than the rest of Europe. And it bred a unity that encouraged the Dutch to throw off their foreign kings and replace them with a home-grown republic. And by a serendipitous twist of fate, a Dutch ruler, William of Orange, took the crown of England in 1688, and fostered Dutch democratic ideals there. From England, ideas of liberalism spread to the American colonies, and around the world.

At its heart, the liberal ideal has meant democracy, free trade, equal rights, and maximizing human choice.

[VAGUELY BAROQUE MUSIC FADES]

Fareed Zakaria: The great liberals' conception was always: you get to pick your idea of happiness. You know, when Jefferson says in the Declaration of Independence that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the core values, what he's really saying is you don't have to ask a church or a king or a commissar what the good life is. You get to pick it. And as long as your conception of the good life doesn't interfere with other people's conceptions, that it doesn't do violence to them, you can do whatever you want. And that's, I think, always been the great promise of liberalism. We promise you that you have the right to live a virtuous life, or to live whatever kind of life you want.

The first half of Fareed’s book is the story of the rise of that liberal democratic ideal, from those obscure, sixteenth-century Dutch origins to a worldview that seemed to rule the world: It beat out Feudalism. It beat Fascism. It beat Communism and won the Cold War. But in the later chapters, Fareed turns to the threats that liberal democracy faces today.

Fareed Zakaria: The populists have the wind behind their sails. Trump is leading in the polls. Marine Le Pen, uh, is leading in the parliamentary polls in France. Look at Latin American elections in the last two years. Everyone who's won has been anti-establishment. Sometimes they're from the, the left, uh and sometimes they're from the right, like the crazy guy Milei in, in Argentina. Geert Wilders won the Dutch election, another right-wing populist.

The way Fareed sees it, right versus left is no longer the main political battle. These days, elections are being fought over a completely new set of divides:

Fareed Zakaria: Left and right was the classic definition of 20th-century politics, and it revolved around the economy, the state's role in the economy. Those on the left wanted more taxes, more regulation, more redistribution. Those on the right wanted lower taxes, less regulation, less redistribution. It's no longer a particularly useful way of thinking about the world because if you think about it, most of the populist parties around, uh, that are now called right-wing, they're in favor of a big state. They're in favor of lots of spending. They're not particularly in favor of low taxes.

Fareed Zakaria: The issues they care about, the new divide is open versus closed. Do you want a society that is open capital, open information, open, uh, in terms of multiculturalism and diversity, uh, open in terms of trade and technology, or are you very suspicious of all this, and you want, a more closed society, more, more protectionism, more nationalism, more cultural chauvinism, less diversity, less multiculturalism. That's the big divide.

And in many cases, the leaders that are pushing for more closed, inward versions of their countries, are going after democracy, too.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has muzzled independent media, and is building effectively a one-party state. Tunisia's president has jailed his critics and ripped up the democratic institutions that had made his country the Arab Spring’s sole success story. Likewise, the leaders of India, Turkey, and a host of many other countries are all consolidating their own power.

All this means a rise in what Fareed terms “illiberal democracy.” By the way, that's a term that he coined.

Fareed Zakaria: You are seeing in certain societies around the world the reality of reasonably democratic procedures: free elections that are let's say mostly fair, uh, governments that are mostly popular, yet that undermine individual rights, individual liberties, separations of church and state, undermine independent institutions like the media, judiciary and such. And that's why I say it's not liberal democracy, but it's illiberal democracy. It has the democratic wrapping, but without the inner stuffing, without the core of values and rights and protections.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

And that weakening of democracy, combined with the trend towards countries becoming more closed-off, more nationalistic — think the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, or the United States waging a trade war with China. That pair of trends is a deep threat to Fareed's idea of how the world should work.

But a key point of Fareed’s book is that liberalism has always been a lot more fragile than people imagine. With the right conditions and a lot of luck, it has thrived — but there’s always been rival systems trying to snuff it out or knock it off track: the rise of the Soviet Union was more than just a little speed bump:

Fareed Zakaria: Russia might well have had a very different trajectory if you had not had what was essentially a palace coup in 1917, where the Bolsheviks took over and plunged that country in a totalitarian nightmare for 70 years. You know, so there's also been very significant backtracking. So I think there are many, many times when these things have moved badly or we got there by the skin of our teeth.

Peter Bergen: Much of your writing is about the fragility of this liberty project. And I think of Weimar Germany as being one of the most liberal, greatest artistic freedom, comparatively speaking for the time, democratic, and we know where that ended.

Fareed Zakaria: Important point, because most people don't realize this, Peter. If you were to choose any point in the 20th century to have been gay, Weimar Germany was probably the best place you could have been. If you were to choose in 1930, whether to be a Jew in Germany or a black in America, it wasn't even close. A Jew in Germany could be a judge, a banker, a parliamentarian, a mayor. You know, blacks in America were still basically, you know, quasi-slaves in the south. So, it can turn really fast. And that society from 1930 moves to a place by 1936 that's unrecognizable. Uh, and that's about the fragility of democracy. That's about the power of these emotional movements.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Peter Bergen: You, uh, quote at some length Isaiah Berlin. Why him? And what was the point he was trying to make?

Fareed Zakaria: So Isaiah Berlin is a slightly forgotten figure now, but was a dominant, dominant intellectual in the ‘70s, ‘80s.

Born to a Jewish family early in the 20th century, in what was then the Russian Empire, as a young boy, Isaiah Berlin lived through the chaos of the Russian Revolution. His family then fled to the United Kingdom, and Berlin eventually worked for the British government when it was fighting the Nazis.

After the war, Berlin became a political philosopher. And he was always deeply suspicious of those ideologies that claimed that they had found “the answer” to create Utopia right here on earth, whether that answer was “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” or the “Thousand Year Reich.”

And surveying the slaughterhouse of the 20th century, Berlin had good reason to be skeptical of the claims of these political religions.

[MUSIC FADES]

Fareed Zakaria: He understood that in, in an ideological contest between communism and democracy, what communism was offering was something very seductive. And what Berlin says is, don't fall for that trap. Don't fall for those, those kind of systems that promise you that they can figure out what the best life is, they know the truth, they know the good life, they know how to make your life better. And Berlin was sort of reminding people of that, that be wary of people who promise you the answer.

Peter Bergen: The answer usually comes with a ton of body bags, right?

Fareed Zakaria: Historically, when political leaders have said they know the answer, generally speaking what they're saying is: and those who have the wrong answers we have to get rid of, whether through a counter inquisition, whether through a war, whether through purges. You, you will damn well live that good life or you will be killed or imprisoned and you will be turned into second-class citizens at the very least.

Peter Bergen: And of course in your book you deal with the Terror in the French Revolution — which is the origin of the word terrorism where — 17,000 people, I think you say in your book, went to the guillotine because some people thought they knew the truth and these others didn't.

Fareed Zakaria: It's something we, we forget, in today's modern world that the achievement of liberalism, of classical liberalism, of enlightenment liberalism, liberal democracy has been to say that that kind of state-directed, religion-directed, ideology-directed, imposition of virtue, imposition of the meaning of life is deeply dangerous, is bloody, is violent, and that we're happy to live in societies where, the government admits, “We don't have the answer.”

And Fareed’s argument is that that's being taken for granted. That people in democracies all around the world are losing sight of how ugly the alternatives can be.

Fareed Zakaria: We're now getting a new breed of leaders who are telling us they know the answer and who are telling us, you know, we don't like all these constraints, all these checks and balances. We're going to give you your share of the spoils. It's a bad road.

With more humans voting in elections around the world in 2024 than any at time in human history, this year could push the world further down that road. One of the year's most important elections just wrapped up in Fareed's birthplace: India. When we spoke, voting was still going on, and Narendra Modi looked set to take a third term as prime minister… which he did, although not in the landslide that some had predicted. Modi will lead India for five more years, even though he’s become a model for the kind of illiberalism that Fareed deplores.

Fareed Zakaria: India today has to be described as an illiberal democracy because there's virtually no independent media, particularly television. There's very compromised judiciary, compromised institutions, and there's some question as to whether or not you could even call the elections completely free or fair.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Modi has used his popularity and his position to move in an increasingly authoritarian direction.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: His second term in power has been marked by deepening religious polarization and increasing Islamophobia.

Fareed Zakaria: It's a tough package to swallow for somebody like me who grew up in India and felt enormous pride that India, even though a very poor country, was still very democratic.

Peter Bergen: You've been in the room with Modi. You've interviewed him. What's it like to be in the room, and is he turning, uh, India away from its secular roots and constitutional roots into a Hindu-first state with all that that implies?

Fareed Zakaria: Modi is not, you know, he's not a dictator. He's not somebody who comes across that way. He's a charming man. He's very intelligent. He's very articulate, and he has a connection with the masses, there's no question about it. But I think that what Modi represents is something that I find more troubling and more worrying, which is Modi doesn't care about the kind of checks and balances of liberal democratic life. He's never given a press conference in his entire decade as prime minister. He routinely flouts the norms and conventions of, of liberal democracy, uh, and he has without question created an atmosphere in which there are first-class citizens and second-class citizens, and India's Muslims — 200 million of them — are second-class citizens.

[ARCHIVAL SOUND OF MODI DELIVERING AN ANGRY SPEECH IN HINDI FADES UNDER NEWSCASTER]

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Mr. Modi said if the opposition Congress is voted back into power, it would distribute citizens’ wealth among infiltrators and those who have more children, referring to Muslims in India.

Fareed Zakaria: Now, what's more worrying about it is not that he does it, but that it works. There's a large part of the public that is not bought into liberal democratic values, that is comfortable with a certain kind of majoritarianism, nationalism, you know, treating minorities as second-class citizens. He uses his power to get what he wants. In many ways, I think of Trump similarly. I don't think Donald Trump has a kind of plan to be a dictator, but he wants to do what he wants to do. And if democratic norms and rules will stand in the way. Well, he'll break them.

Like Modi, Trump has flirted both with going after political opponents…

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Somebody wants to run against me, I call my attorney general, I say, “Listen, indict him.”

And with exploiting divisions among Americans for his own gain…

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We have some bad hombres here and we’re going to get them out.

Peter Bergen: Speaking of Trump, you wrote a, a recent op-ed essentially saying, you know, in almost every swing state, Trump is essentially winning. And you better get used to it. How did people react to this op-ed?

Fareed Zakaria: So, it went viral. It was fascinating because I thought I was stating just facts.

Fareed Zakaria: I think it's because people are coming to realize that, you know, it's a bit of what we were talking about with India. There are a lot of people who buy into Trump's populism. There are a lot of people who don't care that he has proved to be anti-democratic. January 6th, the flouting of court orders, the flouting of, you know, search warrants, all of that illiberalism. People don't like Trump despite that, they like him because of that.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

There's another leader that Fareed worries is weakening his country’s democracy: Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has been prime minister there for 13 of the past 15 years.

While all eyes are on the war in Gaza at the moment, in the time leading up to it, Netanyahu had been clinging to power in ways that echo other anti-democratic leaders. He tried using his position to dodge corruption cases against him, and he also pursued a plan to dramatically weaken Israel’s independent judiciary. And then came Hamas’s attack on October 7th, Israel’s many months of brutal retaliation, and global criticism of Netanyahu’s handling of the war.

Peter Bergen: Sun Tzu said, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” And it seems pretty clear to me that Netanyahu has no strategy for what he's doing. There's no plan for the day after. His own defense minister is kind of criticizing him publicly, which is extraordinary. Do you see any plan?

Fareed Zakaria: No, I think you put it exactly right. It's tactics without strategy. But there's a reason behind it. There is a strategy. And the strategy is: keep Bibi Netanyahu prime minister. [PETER LAUGHS] So, the, the problem here is that anything Netanyahu does to move towards some kind of post-war thinking, even, forces him to make choices, which would make him lose some of the crazy right-wingers who support him. Right? Because any move towards any greater rights for Palestinians, anything like that means he loses those two cabinet members on his right and if he loses them, he has to hold elections.

Peter Bergen: Is Zionism no longer a sort of liberal project because of the influence of Netanyahu?

Fareed Zakaria: It's a very interesting and actually important question, because I think that one of the things you're seeing on college campuses is a real debate. I mean, outside of the, the craziness and putting up tents where you're not allowed to and all that. There is an issue that's an important and interesting issue, which is, can Zionism be reconciled with liberalism? Because Zionism is a nationalism based on a religion, which normally you'd think is tough for liberalism to reconcile with. And the way Zionism got around that was that I think that, first of all, Jews had been persecuted for 3,000 years. And I think it is perfectly appropriate to say, "You know what, guys, we're going to make an exception in this case. These guys get to have their own state. And it's based on the idea of religion because they, they need a haven. There have been too many pogroms and too many, you know, before you even get to the Holocaust." And I think that's completely right.

Fareed Zakaria: But the second piece of it was that Zionism in its early practice was commendably liberal. You know, liberal Jews who decide to be scrupulous about, you know, rule of law and democracy and liberty and setting up, you know, a state that has all kinds of liberal democratic constitutional features. I think that was all true. What happens is, after ‘67, you get the occupation of these lands. And with the lands come the people.

In the 1967 war against neighboring Arab states, Israel captured territory that it still controls today, but it’s never formally incorporated into Israel. That territory includes the West Bank and Gaza — and the millions of Palestinians who live there.

Fareed Zakaria: This is what David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, the founding prime minister of Israel, warned against, and this is why he said give back the territories. And he was right, because once you take territories and you have people who, who you rule there, you face a terrible dilemma. Either you give these people political rights, in which case Israel will no longer have a fundamentally Jewish character, or you rule over them like a colonial power. You know, Israel today is in an unusual dilemma, which is it has these people under its control, whom it will neither enfranchise nor give their own state. That's almost unique in the modern world. I mean, when the Russians take over parts of Ukraine, the first thing Putin does is gives those people passports. And he says, "You're Russian citizens now." The Palestinians, you know, this is the colonial dilemma, you know, this is what my parents used to talk about about British India, which is you won't enfranchise us and you won't give us our own country.

Fareed Zakaria: And that dilemma is, is cracking liberal Zionism. Because you, you know, it's very hard to maintain that as an ideologically coherent idea, which is why I think until Israel solves the problem of its Palestinian occupation, it will face this challenge. Netanyahu is, in a sense, an expression of this, this reality and a dark expression of it.And it's why you're seeing this college strife because the older generation of Jews, if you will, the parents of many of the kids on college campuses remember Israel as a heroic project. And they think of it as the David against the Goliath of the Arabs. In ‘48, they tried to essentially exterminate Israel. They fail. In ‘67, they try. In ‘73, they try. But what the young people have seen is 20 years of Bibi's government, Bibi Netanyahu, which is, you know, occupation, confiscation of land, imprisonment of people without trials, all that stuff.

Peter Bergen: What you often hear in the United States is, well, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Now, I think that's factually inaccurate because Iraq and Lebanon are both democracies, imperfect ones. But, is Israel one more example of this democratic backsliding that you write about?

Fareed Zakaria: Without any question. Look, I mean, even in Israel, people would tell you that there's a great danger Israel is becoming an illiberal democracy. The way I would put it is: Israel is an extraordinary democracy still, but it is also ruling over a subjugated people. You know, I mean, it's possible to do both. Britain in the 1920s and ‘30s was a extraordinary democracy, but it's also true that it was treating its Indian and Kenyan and, uh, Nigerian citizens as subjects, not as citizens. And that is the reality that, that Israel is in today. The five million Palestinians who live in the West Bank in Gaza are effectively colonial subjects of Israel.

[MUSIC TRANSITION]

Fareed argues that part of liberalism’s problem is that it’s just been too successful for its own good. It brought huge, rapid change to the world — especially in the 20th century — but in ways that primed a backlash. Its secular influence loosened people’s connections to religion and tradition. Its commitment to free trade sent jobs overseas or led people to cross borders to find work. It brought a lot of prosperity, safety, and liberty to the world — but not to everyone equally.

And the people who didn’t gain as much, or who feel pushed aside by all this change… in democracies, those people get to vote too, and they’re making their anger clear.

Fareed Zakaria: It's a cultural reaction; it's, it’s a class reaction at some level against a kind of cosmopolitan, liberal, technocratic, meritocratic elite that has prospered and run the world for the last three or four decades, and there's no denying that. The people who have been at the center of societies, of most societies around the world, certainly rich societies have been people who have been urban, cosmopolitan, multicultural, highly educated. And I think we don't realize that there's a large group of people in every society who deeply resent those people, who deeply resent us.

Peter Bergen: There was this kind of consensus that emerged. You know, these people weren't elected to office that are say, running the World Trade Organization or setting the kind of standards that, that that have existed in the global economy that have left people behind or people feel left behind.

Fareed Zakaria: The effect of all these policies was indeed, as you say, to empower a group of liberal, technocratic, educated elites. And there was a certain condescension towards the others. I've often wondered, mostly meritocracy is a good thing, right?

Fareed Zakaria: My daughter, who's now 20, worked at a restaurant, um, when she was 14, I think, uh, and, she came back after a couple of weeks in the restaurant and I was talking to her and said what did you learn? Uh, you know, first time she'd ever had a job and she said, "You know daddy, the thing about it was — and I don't understand this — the people who work hardest at the restaurant get paid the least." She said the busboys who washed the dishes, they work so hard, they don't have time to take a bathroom break. And they get paid the least. And the guy who opens the bottles of wine, she said, every, every 20 minutes he opens a bottle of wine, and he's like the most highly paid person in the restaurant. [THEY LAUGH] And I thought to myself, you're seeing something very, symbolic and telling about about life, you know, like the I mean, in a weird way, it is a meritocratic system. The wine probably is the highest margin product that the restaurant is selling, and they're probably making the most money on it, and those guys are trained and have skills, and harder to get in the market. But it's a very, it's sad. And it's, you know…

Peter Bergen: Also, people tend to undervalue the role that luck plays in their own lives.

Fareed Zakaria: Luck has an enormous part to play here. A lot of why I made it, why you made it, why you know, the top bankers have made it, had a lot to do with luck. The luck of where you were born, the luck of who your parents were, the luck of the lucky break you got. There's so many points in my life where I got a lucky break, but, you know, we all tend to downplay that and we are all the heroes of our own stories. [BOTH LAUGH] And the other is to forget about how much bad luck played a role in the people who didn't make it.

The question is, what can anyone do about all this? If there are parts of our particular meritocracy that are — ironically — quite unfair, how do we fix them?

Fareed Zakaria: We should be looking at the distance traveled, not the destination reached. It's one of the biggest mistakes I've made in hiring over the years has been that. I've been impressed by the shiny Princeton resume and less impressed by the kid who went to U.T. Austin, but was the first kid in his or her family to go there. And thinking about that trajectory and what it took to get from where that person got to, to U.T. Austin was a better predictor that they were going to go far in life. And so I think we all need to be thinking like that much more and being a whole lot less smug than we are.

Peter Bergen: I mean, that is a very good solution to a particular set of problems, which is how do people access the best institutions in a more democratic way with a small “d.” But what are some other solutions that you think might be helpful to kind of bridge the gaps or roll back the democratic backsliding and some of the problems that you outline in the book?

Fareed Zakaria: I think we need a much more level playing field in American society, in a much more kind of radical way than we think about. So, for, for example, I think, we should be thinking a lot about, you know, legacy admissions. When I went to Yale, the endowment was 1 billion, I think. It's now something like 40 billion. They've expanded the student body 15%. The endowment has gone up 40 fold, and they've expanded it 15%. And Harvard hasn't even expanded. It's unconscionable. What are they doing? You know, we should be trying to ask ourselves how do we break open the doors? How do we increase access? Um, I think that in some of these areas, Northern Europe does a lot better than we do, and you can see it in the data. Social mobility in Northern Europe, even in Canada, is now higher than the United States. That's a shame because that was, if people think of what they thought the American Dream was about, it was about that social mobility.

Peter Bergen: Well, that's fascinating because that is the American Dream, and if that is sort of being turned off to some degree that's very sad.

Fareed Zakaria: You know, the other piece, in terms of how do you create a greater sense of national unity, how do you bridge some of these divides of culture, class, money. And one of the things that clearly bound people together the most was the army. Uh, if you listen to people who went through World War Two or the Korean War, it seems to have been a huge bonding experience. It was an incredible array of different occupations, rich, poor, east, west, all coming together. And universal national service could play that role. "Spend a year. You can go into the army. You can go into, uh, the Coast Guard. You can you know help with the national parks. You can teach in the public schools." But it would be important to me to create some moments where these people all spend time together.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Peter Bergen: I wanted to quote what I take as your conclusion, “Modern civilization has given ordinary human beings greater freedom, wealth, and dignity than any before it. It has empowered billions of people in all kinds of ways.”

Fareed Zakaria: Well, think about it. If you, if I look back to 1900, first of all, my lifespan would be half as long [FAREED LAUGHS] as it's likely to be. I would have died of all kinds of diseases, you know, so you might have been the greatest land-, landowner in the world. [PETER LAUGHS] I think, you know, you could have been a great king in the past and you probably have better dental care today as a working-class person. But more importantly, like think about the life of, of women in 1900 versus today. Think of the life of anyone with, you know, non-white colored skin. Think of the life of anybody who came from the lower classes. You know, it's, it's absolutely true. We made a huge amount of progress and we should be very proud of it. You know, it's a great thing that we've been able to accomplish. And, and I think it's happened across the world for the most part.

[MUSIC FADES]

Reading the book, I was struck by the depth of Fareed’s optimism. I’ve talked to a lot of people on this show over the past two years, and I think it’s rare that they’ve both warned of impending doom… and had so much confidence that the world will pull through — that things will be ok.

Personally, I just don’t know. History is littered with examples where things turned out to be not OK. And while our material conditions may continue to improve; human nature remains pretty stable and is capable of plenty of bad or even evil things.

A core strength of Fareed’s book is his emphasis that it’s not just all a happy march towards happily ever after. We’ve often been titling at the edge of a precipice — and we can’t take our prosperity, safety, or freedom for granted.

Fareed Zakaria: The problem, uh, liberal democracy has is it offers you something very simple. It doesn't say you're going to, you know, live in paradise forever. It doesn't tell you that you are going to create the most glorious empire in the world. Uh, it doesn't tell you you're a superior race than anybody else. It tells you you'll be able to live a nice, ordinary life with a house and a car, and you can do whatever you like in that little bourgeois existence, which I think is a tremendous achievement. But, but, you know, nobody builds cathedrals and goes to war, uh, for the right to have a suburban detached home.

Peter Bergen: Or storms the barricades.

Fareed Zakaria: Or storms the barricades. You need somebody rousing you with something and, and as Trump showed on January 6th, it can be bad stuff, but it does rouse people to the barricades.

Still, to Fareed — humanity’s track record is the best ground for optimism.

Fareed Zakaria: I do believe that human beings want to be free. I think that human beings want greater autonomy over their lives, greater dignity for themselves, and that whenever they're given a choice, you know, they do that. For all that we bemoan the, the breaking up of, the churches and religion and things like that, it's all happening because human beings are voluntarily not going to church. You know, I mean, even stuff like the loss of the independent bookstore. Well, it's happening because people are buying books on Amazon. If, if human beings were not exercising their free choice to buy books on Amazon and instead walk to their local bookstore, we wouldn't have the problem, you know?

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Fareed Zakaria: So there is a reality here and we have to recognize that. At some level, celebrate it, mitigate some of the downsides of it, but let's not forget, it's a great thing to have, to have choice and freedom and liberty and individual dignity. It's been deprived of most human beings for most of human history. Uh, let's, you know, two cheers for liberty.

[MUSICAL FLOURISH]

###

If you enjoyed my conversation with Fareed, you can find his new book Age of Revolutions on Audible, read by Fareed himself.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Luke Cregan, with help from Nathan Ray.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Erik German, Laura Tillman, Holly DeMuth, Sandy Melara, and JP Swenson.

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross.

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.

Our Production Manager is Herminio Ochoa.

Our Production Coordinator is Henry Koch.

And our Delivery Coordinator is Ana Paula Martinez.

Audible’s Chief Content Officer is Rachel Ghiazza

Head of Content Acquisition & Development and Partnerships: Pat Shah

Audible Executive Producer: Lara Regan Kleinschmidt

Special thanks to Marlon Calbi, Allison Weber, and Vanessa Harris

Copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC

Sound recording copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC

Please note: This episode includes excerpts from broadcasts by BBC News.