And now from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio, the Axe Files with your host, David Axelrod.

I always enjoy chatting with Fareed Zakaria. You know him. Brilliant commentator, broadcaster, documentarian and author. And I was reminded of it all over again when we sat down last week at the University Club in Chicago to talk about his latest book, Age of Revolutions. It was a great and sobering discussion about the stormy epoch through which we and liberal democracies everywhere are living today. Here's that conversation. Fareed, it's good to see you.

It's a huge pleasure to be here. To those who saw me in the gym when I was sweaty, I hope you notice I cleaned up nicely. I have to say, this is the nicest room I have ever done a talk in.

Have you said that before?

No. Your Axe Files audience won't be able to see. But this is like you're in a cathedral.

'Yes. Well, because they can't see, I want to tell you that we always do it in rooms like this. So, Fareed, I think the last time we spoke was, on the podcast, was after your book, on post-pandemic America. I want to actually ask you in a little bit about what role the pandemic has played in the sort of tumultuous environment in which we find ourselves today. But this book, which is a really important book, "The Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present" is something that you've been working on for a decade.

Yeah.

Before Trump, before Brexit. Tell me what prompted you to start this, to start this work?

You know, about ten years ago, I began to notice that it seemed like politics in America initially was being upended. There were things happening that seemed big breaks with the pattern that you had, you had seen normally. And this was a a world you were living through while I was, in a sense, studying it, the Tea Party, the way in which the Tea Party came out of nowhere and almost took over the megaphone of the Republican Party and soon essentially took over the Republican Party. There was a wonderful book by Theda Skocpol, a scholar at Yale who spent a lot of time talking to these people. And she found that while there was a, there was an initial feeling that this was all about, this was the traditional Republican insurgency. You know, these people were tired of big government. They wanted low taxes. And she discovered, the more time she spent with them, that wasn't the case at all. This was fundamentally about cultural issues, about immigration, about multiculturalism, about what we would today call the woke agenda. And a lot of it in reaction to the first Black president in the history of the United States. Then I began to notice that you were also seeing something unusual in in terms of a break with history, which was that by about 2014, 2015, it was clear that the United States had come out of the great recession, the global financial crisis, better than any country in the in the world. You know, just to give you a simple example, but in 2008, the eurozone economy and the US economy were about the same size. By the end of Obama's two terms, U.S. was 50% larger than the eurozone economy. We are now twice the size of the eurozone economy, starting out in the same place. But Obama's approval ratings wouldn't move much. And that was a break from a historical pattern where the single best predictor of how well the president's approval rating went was what people thought of the economy. So there was these things that were happening that began to make me think, there's something going on here. And as I started to research it, I thought to myself, we are in these incredibly revolutionary times. Think about all the change that we're experiencing: the information revolution, globalization, the huge cultural shifts in America. When have there been similar revolutions in the past? When have we had politics upended like this in the past? And so it took me on a journey to history to inform the present.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting because we think of the word. I think we have to define terms here, because, you pointedly note in your book, the one thing that you didn't include here is the American Revolution. Because that's not the, that's not what you're talking about here. Talk about how you're defining revolutions for purposes of this.

'Right. Well, that's a that's a great point. And, of course, you know, you're always trying to define things in a way that is helpful to explain something. When I'm using revolution here, in the in a way, the traditional social science way, which is a fundamental restructuring of the socio economic, political basis of a society. You know, something truly transformational that happens rarely. And in that sense, and I'm not the first person to make this argument, the American Revolution is not a revolution. It wasn't a social, economic revolution. It was a war of independence. After all, the the colonists were asking for the rights that they had as English colonists that were usurped by George the Third. In fact, if you read the declaration, it's a long list of things that they say we, you know, we want to do, we just want to get back to what we had. So it was in some ways a restoration, but more importantly, the social-economic basis of power in America did not change. The South, for example, retained the entirely feudal, slave owning structure it had. In the North, it was a it was essentially a landowning feudal elite that, that ran things. There was an effort during the the Whiskey Rebellion was the one effort of a kind of true social revolution, but was put down pretty brutally. So, it for my purposes, the real revolution that takes place in America is basically 1860 to 1880. The the combination of the Civil War and industrialization changes America so much that I think somebody who looked at America in the 1840s and somebody who looked at it in the 1880s, and there were lots of people alive who chronicle this, would have said, My God, I feel like I'm in a different country.

You know, we were talking about, this is parenthetical, but, we were talking before we came out here about Lincoln, and, we all remember him as the who, he saved the Union, he ended slavery and so on. And lost in that discussion is the fact that he laid the foundation for the future. He he laid the groundwork for the transcontinental railroad, land grant colleges, the a national science foundation to promote technology and scientific discovery. Really extraordinary in the midst of war. But that's.

No, but it's an important point, because, you know, we wouldn't have had. People don't realize how decentralized and federal the structure of the American state was. If Lincoln hadn't done what he had done, and if you hadn't had things like the Interstate Commerce Clause, we would not have been the nation that we became. The Civil War partly nationalized the government. It created a federal government of one nation, which didn't exist before.

So, one other term I want you to define is the term liberal, because, you know, it is a commonly used word in our politics, but you're using it in a more classical way. So talk about that.

You know, in a sense, what I'm talking about is if you step back and say to yourself, what has been the biggest change that has taken place politically in the world in the last 3 or 400 years? It is the rise of liberal democracy and liberalism in politics and economics. And by that I mean the focus on the individual, his liberty, his freedom, her liberty, her freedom. And that is the great project of the enlightenment and of the and, in many ways that the, the American Revolution powerfully accelerated, of, you know, not vesting power in kings and courts, in churches, in which those entities owned all the land or all the economic basis of society, but rather in individuals. And that liberal project is really what I think fundamentally has created the modern world. And it's created the world of liberal democracy, of individual rights, of the rule of law, of constitutions. And what I worry about, and the reason I want this broad, definition of liberal, which is historically true and it's still how Europeans, for example, use the term. Sometimes you say neoliberal. Is, is that we are currently facing challenges all over the world to that very basic idea of liberalism, of liberal democracy, of the legacy of the enlightenment, because there's a whole bunch of people who are saying, you know, we don't like all these constraints on power. We just want to have a strongman, our guy, who's going to do whatever he wants. We don't want the separation of church and state. I mean, we have currently in Washington, the Speaker of the House of Representatives who has several times on the record said he does not believe in the separation of church and state. Now, that is one of the founding elements of the United States of, you know, of constitutions all over the world that have modeled themselves on the United States. So we have, you know, we have a challenge that we haven't faced before to this much. It's much beyond left and right in the way we have used it, you know, which was basically one side wanted to spend more money, the other side wanted to spend less, one wanted to tax more. Now we're we face a kind of a frontal assault on the the very idea of, you know, liberal democracy, free speech, separations of power, separation of church and state. It's a much bigger challenge.

You, you talk about the resistance that has grown. And, you know, I was there if people weren't paying attention in the fall of 2008 at these rallies that Sarah Palin was having. But you could see the outlines of what was to come at those rallies. And those protests weren't. Taxes were raised and so on, but it was about, America, what is an American? And is is Obama an American? And so on. And that was what was generating the heat that we, that we saw. But you know what's interesting in, about your book, and you you go back and seize on these historical examples, is that it's not just about revolutions. And the revolutions, as you say, you're talking about are innovations that change the nature of how we live. And then they invite backlash. That is the pattern that you've found in history. So talk about that and then let's talk about where we are today.

Yeah. No.

I waited as long as I can.

It was fascinating to me how, how this pattern persists. So I'll tell you the first one, which I, you know, which I think is the most unusual. So we really begin this whole project with the Dutch, which I know sounds like an unusual thing to say, but.

It always starts with the Dutch.

I said. I said on Colbert, I'm very high on the Dutch, which was unintentionally hilarious. But anyway. And of course, of course, he looks and says, yeah, we all are. But they're the first ones to really innovate technologically, the creation of tall ships and navigation, water management so they reclaimed large parts of the, of the land. And they become the richest country in Europe and therefore the richest country in the world. And in doing that, they create a new model, which is now the modern model, which is a nation defined by its its capacity in technology, in industry, in trade, you know, in financial innovation rather than what used to be, which is the large landed estates, the large farms, you know, that was the old agricultural model. And the Dutch pioneered this new model. And they didn't have a particularly large army. So it was a very, very modern conception of both economics and politics. And it produces an identity revolution. So the first thing you notice is as they they grow rich, they started to they think of themselves as Dutch, not as part of the Habsburg Empire, which was, they were one one province of the, of the vast Hapsburg Empire. And they start to think of themselves as different, because now, you know, they're noticing they're different. They're smart, they're innovative. They also start to notice that they're not Catholic, they're Protestant. And as the Protestant Reformation spreads, that becomes a core part of their identity. And they break off from the Habsburg Empire. And then what begins to happen? And they create really the first modern politics. You get two parties, and one of those parties starts saying, this is too much change, we're going too fast, we're unmoored from the past. Let us take you back to when, you know, let's let's go back to when the Netherlands was great again. Let let me take you back to that world. Right. So right at the start.

I knew he got that somewhere.

'You know. Yeah. You have the nostalgia, which is a core part of this, you know, this, this counter-revolution, this backlash. And what's interesting to me is even then, some of it is economic, some of it is, you know, a lot of change, a lot of farmers being displaced. But a lot of it is cultural. A lot of it is a sense of, you know, we have we've unmoored ourselves from the traditions that that that made us strong. And that pattern, you see repeating itself. The industrial revolution produces a huge backlash. You know, if you think about it, the, the, the biggest transformations of the Industrial revolution take place in the second Industrial revolution, really the one that made Chicago the great city that it is, between about 1880 and 1920. And electricity, cars, telephone, railways, movies, all that starts to. And do you think just some of, that was just electricity alone? Just think about how that transforms, you know, previously agricultural. And you begin to see a huge backlash everywhere. You get communism from the left, fascism from the right. You get world wars, you get the collapse of three huge multinational empires. So I argue that the what we're going through now is at that scale, because we have several of these revolutions, economic globalization, techno, information revolution, you know, technology and identity all happening at the same time.

I should point out that a few miles down Lakeshore Drive, which wasn't there then, probably. But, William Jennings Bryan made his Cross of Gold speech, probably the greatest populist speech ever made by an American politician. An obscure former congressman made a speech about the gold standard on behalf of rural Americans and working people who felt impinged by the monetary policy, and he ended up as the nominee of the party, 36 years old.

Three times

So.

And by the way, he he represents that, you know, that extraordinary reaction and backlash to change, in those days, largely in his case, economic, because, you know, that was the the big issue at the time. But don't forget it becomes culturally very quickly. Remember, for all of us who have seen that wonderful movie.

Inherit the Wind.

Inherit the Wind, where he is defending the teaching of, you know, the Bible literally and against evolution.

He literally, that was his last public act was to testify. And he died a few days later in the Scopes trial in Tennessee. So the cultural was mixed.

'There's a great anecdote in the book that I'm very proud of, which is I found a, an academic who who decoded, The Wizard of Oz, which is which he which he, this academic argues is actually a populist parable, which I think it's brilliantly done. So, Dorothy, of course, comes from Kansas. Right. Good Midwestern farming state. And she goes and she, she travels, you know, to, to find the land of Oz. O-Z being the symbol for gold. Right. In the in the, in the book, not in the movie, her shoes, by the way, are silver. Not not not red. Silver being the metal that the populace wanted, because that would have allowed for inflation. So she meets along the way the, the Scarecrow who represents the farmers who are too scared to do anything, the Tin Man who is a worker who has no heart, the, the and the lion. The two witches are the Wicked Witch of the West and the East, and the coastal elites whom the populace hated. And the lion is William Jennings Bryan, who had a great roar but couldn't actually deliver anything.

So let's talk about where we are now, because it's it's, your book is not called The Age of Revolution. It's called The Age of Revolutions. And you mentioned this earlier. There are a lot of things going on at once, and I'm not sure. While there may be precedent in how people react to them, it feels as if part, largely because of technology, that this is a more involved kind of challenge that's happening on a whole number of different levels.

'So you're absolutely right. The technology piece of it alone, if you just think about what has happened, it's hard for us to realize that we have lived through something so dramatic. But we have. Think about what the world looked like before software, you know, before you. Basically, we still lived in a world of atoms where things moved mechanically, and we've created this entire digital economy where the only thing that matters is the software that controls the. Think about the, you know, the car. The car was an actual machine that needed oil and filter, and now it's software on wheels. And, you know, and that is kind of a metaphor for the transformation that's taking place and, and the displacement and the devaluing of so many professions and industries that were once incredibly important. But that's just one piece of it. Think about globalization. In the last 30 years, we have seen about 3 billion people join the open global trading economy, because India, China, the, all of Latin America, large parts of Africa. Now, if you go back in the 50s and 60s and say, you know, that was after World War Two, the expansion of globalization. Yeah, you know, Japan came online, and that's, you know, 60 million people, maybe. South Korea comes online because, of course, the communist world is, you know, is deliberately keeping itself out of that world. Singapore, Hong Kong. And then in the 1980s and 90s, you start to get this seismic shift where these vast countries, you know, much of the world starts to participate in the same system. Or then take the identity revolution. And this is the one I think we don't think about enough. For all of human history, that some tribe has been on top and some tribe has been on the bottom, and one oppress the other. And that's pretty normal. But in all of human history that we know of, one group was always second class: women, right? And then. For many, many, most societies in the world, they were the property of men until just a few hundred years ago. And then in the last 40 years, I would argue, we've fundamentally, and thank God, changed that. But we're not there yet. But, you know, it's a huge, huge shift that's taking place. But think about how disruptive that is in historical terms, right? You've taken a basic unit of society, the family, and we've altered the structure of power within it. And you take all these three things together and you say to yourself, does that leave some people feeling disoriented, dislocated, feeling their world is upended? Yeah. And I mean, if you just think about the, you know, the issue of women, it's not an accident, in my view, that all the religious, reactionary movements of our time, from Islamic fundamentalism to Christian nationalism to the ultra-Orthodox and Haredi in Israel, they all want to return to very traditional roles for women. You know, that is a common theme in all these these reactions.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the Axe files. And now back to the show. You didn't mention. Part of, the key to globalization is is trade. We're here in the Midwest. We've seen, we saw a lot, particularly in the 80s and 90s, a lot of communities that were devastated because plants moved, jobs were lost. Oftentimes those plants were the center of the town. So that was dislocating. You know, you mentioned that complicated dynamic of women entering the workforce. You saw a lot of men leaving the workforce. That was dislocating. And another factor. Well, well, talk about that because you and I. I mean, I am not a Luddite. I'm wearing my Apple Watch. I've got a cell phone in my pocket. I'm completely enlisted. Okay. Though you cite the dislocation, and you're clearly empathetic to people who are going through it, you know, you are a champion of trade, of technology, of openness. You say the big battle is actually between people who want to open up and people want to close. But it is understandable if your community was decimated, if your job was lost, that you would be resentful. And there was a lot of chatter, as you wrote about this, during the time in which trade really claimed jobs. Although, as you point out, automation claimed a lot more. About we're going to retrain you, right? We're going to find you a job, and you're going to be part of this modern economy. And it was like, well, where's this job and what job is it? And people have been doing the same kinds of work for generations. That is a legitimate source of, of, of pain and loss that it's it strikes me that we've been insufficient, that we were insufficiently sensitive to.

You know, I think you're absolutely right, David. And I think we're still, we still haven't figured this out. So it's a big subject. So bear with me. The first thing to say is, the reason I'm for these things is, first of all, you can't uninvent technology, right? You can. I mean, think about something like AI now. What are we going to do? Put it back in a box? You know, put put the genie. You can't do that. Somebody else will do it. More importantly, you also do need to move forward. You have to. You want your country to be at the cutting edge. You want it to be taking advantage of all the, you know, the the things that can happen if you are moving. At the end of the day in order to solve any problem, you need resources. And the way you generate resources is through growth. Think about climate change. The countries that are able to do something about climate change are the countries that are generating resources so that they can do something about it. Poor countries don't have that option.

Let me let me just interrupt you for a second, because climate change is a good example. I feel as strongly about as anywhere. I suspect there's a big consensus in this room about the need to to do more on climate change. But I know that there are people out there who have made a living all their lives extracting energy from the ground and in related industries and probably generations before them. And so when we say climate is an existential crisis, they're thinking of the existential crisis of losing a good middle class job. How do we create dialog, and more than dialog, what do we do about that?

It's the perfect example of this larger point, which is. So. So ideally, what you want to do is to embrace openness, change, dynamism, and create the resources that will allow you to solve some of these problems. Now, we did do that in large part. So the simplest way I can I can make this point to you is, what country would you have liked the United States to trade places with over the last 30 or 40 years? As I point out, we started with the eurozone economy in 2008. Same size. We're twice as large now. Okay. If Great Britain were to join the United States as the 51st state, it would be the 51st poorest state in the union below Mississippi in the average income of people, right. So we have managed to generate extraordinary growth out of this. The problem that we have had is we have not, A, we have not spent nearly enough to try and cushion people, retrain people, to do the things that we need to do. Your your, your boss Obama once gave a wonderful speech where he said, we all know trade benefits everyone. We know it raises it raises the whole country. And we always say, but it has bad distributional effects. Some communities get devastated, and we say, therefore we have to spend money on those people. And we never do. And we, we and we keep moving on. Think, you know, because when the time comes to benefit from the trade, we're all happy to do it. When the time comes to write the checks, we're not. Look. Or if you think about the last 30 or 40 years, the United States has generated crazy amount of resources. What have been the major expenditures the United States has done? If you want to start with 1980, what you have is three massive Republican tax cuts. The Reagan tax cut, the Bush tax cut and the Trump tax cut. And then two enormous wars, the Afghanistan and Iraq. And if you look at the pile of debt that, you know, that's about 50% of it, it's just those three things that, you know, four things that I mentioned. And imagine if those resources had been devoted to the kind of things that we all can. I remember. I don't know if it's meant to be off the record, but when, when, when Trump was president, because she lived in New York and because she's a nice human being, a decent human being. Ivanka Trump and I had known each other a little, and she called me one day to say, I'm taking over the issue of retraining, job retraining, apprenticeships and things like that. And I'd love your thoughts on it. So I said to her, look, here's the fundamental thing you've got to look at. Go, go and look at the Germans. They're the ones who are able to do this better than anybody else. But please take a look and add up how much the German government spends per person on retraining. It is 20 times what we spent. So when you're trying to figure out what is the clever German model like, there's a simple answer there. They spend a whole lot of money on that, and we don't. You know, so we never committed ourselves in that way. And I think that there are other issues. You know, I do think that when communities go down, as you know, I write in the book, it's not just an economic issue. You lose your life because you lose the bowling league that was part of the steel plant. You lose the hardware store because now Home Depot has taken it over. You lose the movie theater because now Netflix has has killed it. You lose the bookshop because Amazon has taken it away. So you lose a life. And maybe you're making about as much money as you were. And the data does show that many of these places, people are making about as much money as they were. But you lose some, you know, you lose the community. And so that's what I mean when I say we haven't thought more ambitiously about this, because there's the money piece of it, but there's also what do you do? I this is why I'm not sure that, like, universal basic income is going to work because particularly for men, so much of that sense of status and dignity comes from the idea that you work and you get an idea that.

And that you have value in the society.

Right? And being told, sit at home and what make you a check? I'm not sure, you know. So I think you're absolutely right. You know, and as you know, I grapple with this in the conclusion. But I don't have a satisfactory answer. But but I do think there's something around the idea of communities that, that, that, you know, if you can keep intact a sense of community and, and something about that that I think, you know, man is a social animal. Human beings are social. They want that. And when they lose that, I think that that sense of loneliness, you know, the surgeon general says we have an epidemic of loneliness in this country. I do think it's related to that.

We should point out, because I want to talk more about loneliness. I want to talk more about technology. But you also talk about the impact of that of the long wars, the impact of the financial crisis in 2008, in which many people felt like Wall Street got bailed out and and they ended up in distress. And we went through a pandemic that you you wrote a whole book about that. And I'm not sure we have recovered from that, to be honest. We, I think we have PTSD. So there's a lot of alienation out there. Talk about the impact of communications technology. When social media came about, when the internet came about, we celebrated that this was going to connect the world, that we were going to be, you know, we were going to find community in that. And in some ways we have, but as you point out, but in other ways, it has become a dramatically isolating phenomenon. And so it adds to that sense of loneliness and detachment that you speak of.

You know. So I think it's important. We sometimes when we look at technology, we, we focus on the problems, which are real, but we forget, or we sort of pocket, as it were, the gains. Right. You have your iPhone in your pocket, because you can't imagine at this point living life without what is in fact a supercomputer that you have in your pocket. You know, it's it's crazy to think about this, but you know, we're on most of you must have some version of iPhone 11, 12, 13, right? The iPhone 10 had more computing power than the entire space program that took human beings to the moon and back. Times 10. You have 10 times more computing power in your pocket than the entire NASA operation here. So we and.

I just want to just say one thing about this. In 2008, January of 2008, may have been 2007. It must have been 2007. Barack Obama went to Silicon Valley and he met with Steve Jobs. And he came back from that meeting and he said, gang, he showed me the prototype of a product they're going to roll out in June, and it's going to be the biggest thing ever. And he sort of described what he saw, and it was the iPhone. It was the iPhone. He also warned us that none of us could buy Apple stock, because we'd all go to jail now that he had told us about it. But I don't even, I think even he did not realize just how revolutionary that one discovery was.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well what Gates, qhat what what Jobs understood, which is, you know, again, just really brilliant psychological insight, is that what human beings wanted was their own personal computer that was at their beck and call, always in their pocket. You know, think about the crazy thing about the phone is that we call it a phone, but we rarely use it to make phone calls. Right? It's it's really a supercomputer in your pocket that allows you to. So but there's huge benefits from that. And there's benefits in terms of you have access to all the knowledge of the world all the time, all that. But there's also community. You, think about, you know, the the gay kid who's growing up in, you know, in rural Alabama or in, you know, or the woman in Afghanistan who, you know, the connection to the outside world of your own community is not one that's hospitable. The ability to see big and dream big and connect. These are, you know, it's it's had a huge impact on unlocking human potential. But I think you're right that when you look at social media, what has happened is that the social media companies have figured out that the way they can make the most money is by keeping you the most engaged and the most intensely engaged. And unfortunately, it turns out that the way to keep you most engaged is to create a kind of tribalism where you think of your tribe, you are opposed to the other tribe, you get, or you only see stuff that reinforces it. You know, to put it simply, hate generates more intense interaction. It's profitable. And, you know, I have to confess, I'm a little surprised by this, because it doesn't work. It doesn't move me in the same way I, I, you know, I'm sort of a sunny optimist by nature, and I don't I don't do that. But particularly if you're lonely, particularly if you're, you know, things, that things are hard. The idea that you can find other people with whom you can vent. There's something very powerful. And the and the anonymity of social media, I think, allows this. I, look, I don't know if you've had the same experience. I've written a lot of stuff. I've caused people to dislike me for some things I've written. Sometimes people dislike me because who I am, how I look, the you know, my name. I've gone through the this, this country, you know, giving speech, speeches, all that stuff. I have maybe twice had an unpleasant encounter in person with somebody who was nasty to me, to my face. I've had tens of thousands of nasty tweets. You know, people feel somehow licensed in that anonymous or pseudonymous environment, even if they have their name, they're sitting in their basement. You know, there's something which, it encourages vent and spleen and, and it's it's very sad. And, and I also.

It also encourages something else, which is division. And it speaks to the backlash portion of your work here, that it has turbocharged a sense of, of, of backlash, because we are driven into our silos where we're sometimes informed but always affirmed. And everybody outside the silo is not just someone who has a different point of view or a different background, but alien. And it has had an impact on our politics. Our politics now mirrors that. Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has very little caloric content, why is she why is she one of the chief fundraisers in the Republican Party? Because she is the personification of the social media model. She just goes after outrage, and people send her money. So one of the things I want to ask you about, one of the things that worries me is, about democracy, is that we've designed them to move slowly when we are divided. Change is coming at us more and more rapidly because of technology. People are more anxious, and government is moving more slowly, it feels, because we're divided. And it seems like a caustic kind of mismatch that gives the Chinese and others who are arguing that democracy is spent and isn't agile enough to deal with today's problems, though they're not doing that great right now either, gives them a talking point. I just worry that technology is changing so quickly, we can't get our arms around all the impacts.

Yeah, you know, I think that this is I don't know if this is a flaw, but it does seem as though the American structure of constitutional government, the way our system works, has interacted very badly with information technology, you know, and social medi., because what it's done is it's created this, you know, extraordinary siloization, which then produces intense tribal, extremist views. And those views then, as you say, dominate the two great political parties, particularly, one has to say on the Republican side. You know, where, you know, it's the it's the AOCs and the and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes who dominate. These are freshmen congressmen who normally would have no power and actually have enormous power, because they can control fundraising, the agenda. And all of that is because of this. It was, in my opinion, bad enough that you have now a system of primaries where you will have only the most extreme people voting in the, in the, in the, you know, for the candidate. But now you have Twitter, which is the most extreme of the most extreme, you know, so you've gone down to probably what, 1% of the parties controlling the agenda. You don't see.

Elon Musk asks that you call it X.

X. I. You don't see so much of that in Europe. You certainly see the rise of populism all over Europe, by the way. There's this there's this, you know, again, when you think about.

It's not an American.

Not an American. And that's one of the reasons why I say if we had coddled our workers, would we be would we have no populism? Look at France. France coddles its workers more than anyone. If we had maintained manufacturing, Germany has maintained manufacturing. It now has a, you know, a far right party that is draws, you know, roots or parallels to the Nazi party. Sweden has some of the lowest levels of inequality in the world, and the second largest party in Sweden is now an avowedly fascist party that traces its roots to the 20s.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the Axe Files. And now back to the show.

But but one thing that you don't have in Europe is this intense, you know, kind of tribalism and partiaanship where they won't work with one another, there, you know, there's just this sense of politics as war. I mean, look at the Republicans now. They're they're governing as if they have a two thirds majority in the House of Representatives when they have a two seat majority.

One right now.

One right, right. It's sort of, you know, and that's about the idea that it's almost evil to collaborate with the Democrats. Right. And so what that spirit does seem to come from this constitutional struggle, it's the electoral system we have where we have these two parties, where the primaries, where social media, so influences the outcomes of the primaries. Somebody pointed this out to me that if you look at people like AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene, actually it's 5 to 7% of the voting public that elected them, you know, because the contested primary and then it's a safe seat. So actually, it's a very small, you know, we we are actually not nearly that polarized or partisan, but our system magnifies it, and the technology accelerates.

I always feel, when people raise them as bookends, I feel like I don't agree with AOC on everything, but there's a difference between advocating for universal health care and suggesting that Jewish space lasers are responsible for forest fires in California.

And I think that's true, but. I think that's true. But what I think is similar and and, of course, and, you know, as you know, in the book, the Republican Party has gone crazy. Let's let's stipulate that. But but what's similar is the structure of politics that allows a freshman congressman narrowly elected in a primary and one to become so important, because social media elevates that person. In the old days, you would have that to spend 20 years and go on committees and know something about these subjects and, you know, bring jobs home to. I mean, she kills the Amazon deal in New York, which was going to bring 25,000 or 40,000 jobs to New York, because it it worked better as a tribune of the left to say I oppose big corporations than to actually bring jobs into your own district. That's a kind of inversion of what Democratic politics is meant to be.

Well, talk about inversion. You write that there are there is a historical. One, one effect of these revolutionary times is that parties sometimes morph into something else that they they. And that's certainly happening now. The composition of the Democratic electorate is changed. The composition of the Republican electorate is changed. It's more of a predominantly white but not exclusively working class party. Suburbanites tend to be more and more leaning toward Democrats. Why is that happening?

'So it's the it's the fundamental shift from economics as the primary determinant of your political identity to these social issues and cultural issues. So if you look in the middle of the 20th century when, by the way, you know, most people don't, we don't realize. But America was still you know, it's still an up and coming country. Per capita GDP, adjusted for inflation in America in 1950 was 15,000. You know, if you looked at the average home sizes of the all that kind of thing, it's still modest. And so the big struggle was about economics. And basically the simplest way to predict your voting patterns were did you work at a blue collar job? Did you work with your hands and did you make less than the median income? You voted left. The other side. White collar, more than the median income. You voted right. And this is true in Europe as well. What happened in the 70s and 80s is you created a mass middle class. Those economic issues became less pressing, and cultural issues became more what social scientists call post materialistic values. Your identity as a woman, your identity as a African American, as a Hispanic, as somebody who was Jewish, somebody who's gay, somebody who's a lesbian. All these identities become more and more important. And today, as you know, the simplest way to predict whether somebody is going to vote is to look at entirely different markers. I mean, you can either look at their views on the three G's, God, guns and gays or or you can look at simply.--.

Their education level.

Their education level, their rural, urban, you know. It's it's it's these cultural, dynamics that have that play a much larger role. And I think it adds to the partisanship, David, because in the old days, you know, in economics, you can split the difference. You know, you want to spend $100 billion. I don't want to spend anything. Well, there's a number in between those. How do you split the difference when you're talking about gay rights? When you're talking about abortion, when you're talking about is my America being being destroyed because you're having all these people come in from different parts of the world? You know, these are these are issues of identity, and they feel existential to people. And I think that's what makes it harder to compromise.

You write about, and you mentioned earlier, this other element, which is the element of respect. I was talking to you earlier. You know, we had a pandemic and there were a lot of valiant Americans who do jobs that we don't pay attention to, they're invisible to us, who suddenly became essential, you know, because they do things that keep the country moving. And they let us eat and do the basic things that we want to do, and we lionized them for a few months. And then when the pandemic ended, they sort of receded. And, you know, this is my critique of the Democratic Party in which I've, you know, been involved with, and still, and still am aligned with, but I do think as the Democratic Party has become a sort of cosmopolitan, educated, urban party, that it still maintains its commitment to economic fairness for people in rural areas and, the poor and so on. But it communicates a message that is sort of, we are going to help you become more like us, and we are going to help you become more like us. And implicit in that is there is something less if you work with your hands, you work with your back, you didn't, you don't have a college degree, and so on. And I think that is part of the alienation that drives some of this Trumpism. Let me ask you about the strongman, because you just described earlier. All of this is assaulting our senses. There is a sense that things are kind of out of control. In that environment, the strongman becomes more appealing.

The strongman becomes more appealing for two reasons. One, because, you know, to to take your earlier comment, you really have created these almost two worlds, right? One, I mean, it really is two Americas, one more urban, more educated, more multicultural, the other more rural, more Christian, more white, less educated. And the two sides look at each other with great suspicion. And particularly people, you know, the rural, less educated feel looked down on, as you say. And so they search for a tribune. And what they and they feel like the system isn't working, because the system is somehow screwing them. The system is leaving them in this, you know, in this lesser than state. So why not blow the whole thing up? And you're absolutely right. The 2008 financial crisis was, you know, Steve Bannon said to me once, without that crisis, you would not have a right wing populism and Trump in America, because that made a whole vast group of people feel the system, you know, we were told that these guys are the smartest guys in the room. The meritocracy, meritocracy, they're they've created this amazing economy. It turned out it was a house of cards. It all collapsed, and then they bailed themselves out. But when we lose our jobs, nobody bails us out. Right? So that feeling of the fundamental.

And they said, let's run out and get a guy with a gold toilet seat from New York.

Because, because, because he's an outsider, he is angry, he's defiant. And he too is is willing to burn the house down. I don't actually think he is, but but but Trump you know, he, I've often said he's a bad businessman, but he's a good salesman. Oh yeah. He understands what those people.

He has a feral genius for it.

Right. He understands what they want to hear. He, you know, he if you if you listen to him. Those those, rallies. He understands how to touch people and the thing they care about. And sometimes it's, you know, he's appealing to their worst angels, not their best angels, but but he's, but he's appealing.

But I'll tell you, at the core, Fareed, is something very genuine. Donald Trump, his father, told him that you have to be a killer or a loser.

Right.

There. Only there, there's only one or the other. And you've got to be a killer. And the subtext was, the world is The Hunger Games. The Hunger Games wasn't around then. But the strong take what they want, the weak fall away, and people who abide by rules and laws and norms and in and respect institutions are suckers. And that's what he believes.

Yep.

And, that is dangerous for democracy.

The tragedy, the tragedy about Trump in America, for me, is not, I think. I agree with you, everything you said. The tragedy is something like 35 to 40% of the public seems to support him and agree with it. You know, it's not that he thinks the election was rigged. It's that 85 to 90 million Americans agree with him.

Well, that goes to the ability to brand and he will brand these trials that way. He he has. Whatever you think about Donald Trump, one should not underestimate him. He is very, very good at that.

We'll think about what he'll do with the trials. He'll say, you guys think that a bunch of overeducated, fancy liberals who live in cities have rigged the system against you? Look at what a bunch of overeducated, fancy lawyers in cities are doing by putting, you know, by trying to take me off the table with all these clever legal maneuvers that you don't understand. I have very mixed feelings about these trials, because I think they feed the basic narrative that, you know, there's a bunch of, of, of of this this is what the meritocracy, meritocracy does. It takes the guys it doesn't like them with some fancy legal maneuver. It's not going to let Americans choose.

Yeah, yeah. The closing words of your book, are, I think, worth sharing because I don't want to leave people in despair here. And you throw out a challenge. But implicit in the challenge is hope.

In his magisterial television show, Civilisation, the great art historian Kenneth Clark asks why a civilization like Rome that was once dominant could collapse into the barbarism of the Dark Ages. He concluded that beyond the material causes, there was a mental one. It is a lack of confidence more than anything else that kills a civilization. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs. Modern civilization has given ordinary people greater freedom, wealth and dignity than any before it. It has empowered billions of people in all kinds of ways. If it collapses and the new Dark ages arrive, it will be because in our myopia, our internacine squabbles, and our petty rivalries, we lost sight of the fact that we are heirs to the greatest tradition in history, one that has liberated the human mind and spirit, that created the modern world, and whose greatest achievements are yet to come. So, I mean, I would. I would I would add to that, you know, just in the sense of thinking about America particularly. We're doing we're trying to do something very hard in America. We're trying to create, you know, a kind of a really a universal nation, a nation where people from all over the, you know, from whatever their background, whatever their gender, whatever their skin color, feel welcome, feel productive, feel that they are equal citizens and not just, equal legally, but truly equal. You know, they don't have to hide in the shadows if they're gay. They don't have to, you know, be second class if their if their skin color is, different. That is a hard challenge. But we are doing it, and we are doing it in the context of an incredibly dynamic economy that is trying to produce enough resources that we can take care of everyone. I don't think we should give up on this, because it's it's an extraordinary journey. It's an extraordinary adventure. I go to other countries, I tell you, nobody else is doing it as well as we are. I mean, you go to Italy, you go to places like Europe, and you do not see women in the forefront of business the way you do. You know, you I mean, you look at the tech CEOs and they all have, you know, for most Americans, unpronounceable names. And these are the most powerful people in the country, right? And they're all, you know, Indian Americans, Chinese Americans. Like, that's America at its best. We have to figure out how to deal with the places that get left behind, the people that get left behind. But we are the richest country in the history of the world, and we are the freest country in the history of the world. Surely that's am you know, that's a challenge we can undertake. And, you know, instead of kind of collapsing into a cynicism that says, this whole thing is not working, let's burn it all down.

Yeah. Well, I've always said that democracy is an ongoing battle between cynicism and hope. And I urge all of you to engage in the politics of hope. And I also urge you to read Fareed's book, because it's really essential reading. Fareed Zakaria, thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Axe Files, brought to you by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Finder Annenberg. The show is also produced by Saralena Barry, Jeff Fox, and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Steve Lickteig and Haley Thomas. For more programing from the IOP, visit politics, dot u Chicago, dot edu.