--:-- metabolize together before puta pm On Monday, I joined Freed Zakaria at Symphony Space in New York City for a conversation from a live audience about his 2024 book Age of Revolutions, which just came out in paperback. Age of Revolutions examines the historical roots for the ongoing rise of far-right populism. But it does so by looking back at other periods in which politics began to topple and fall into upheaval when the things people thought were possible, the things they knew were true, stopped being true. And new forms of politics became possible. Book, obviously with a lot of relevance to this era. And we even had some audience questions at the end, so I thought I would share it on the feed. Without further ado, here's our conversation. All right. Hello, everybody. Thank you for being here tonight. Welcome to Symphony Space. I'm Ezra Klein, columnist and podcast host at The New York Times, and this tonight is going to be a podcast. So I've been reminded to remind you to please silence your phones because it's really hard to edit out. And I'm so thrilled to be here with Freed Zakaria tonight, the host of Freed Zakaria GPS on CNN and author of the great book Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, which came out in paperback on November 4th. Congratulations. Thank you so much, Ezra. It's a huge pleasure to be here. This is book number what for you? uh it's i think it's my fifth uh so i have an academic dissertation which was published by princeton university press and then i have five books after that so this is the sixth book but um as a friend of mine says you never talk about your academic dissertation it's like the the little indie movie that you made before you went to hollywood so so the one that really represents you exactly Before you sell out. Exactly. Okay. The... All right. The run of show tonight is we're going to chat for a while. A number of you have kindly submitted questions, which I have chosen with extreme discretion and prejudice that I will ask at the end. And we're going to have a great time. So I want to begin, Fareed, with where you open the book, which is one of the more unusual scenes I've imagined. So you opened the book around a conversation you had with Steve Bannon in Rome. And I got to say, I found this chain very funny. Steve Bannon quotes George Soros approvingly to you, saying, we live in revolutionary times. Bannon says he agrees with Soros. And then your whole book is agreeing with Steve Bannon. So what do you all agree on? I think what we agree on is that something fundamental has changed in the political system. You know, I began to think about this book in 2011, 2012 with the Tea Party. And the reason was that the Tea Party represented something very unusual, a kind of insurgency within the Republican Party. Now, remember, most people forget this now, but the Republican Party used to be the state, boring, hierarchical party that just went along with the party elders doing whatever they were told, right? It used to be the line when choosing a nominee, you'd say the Democrats fall in love with their presidential nominee, like Kennedy, Clinton, Obama. The Republicans fall in line. This is a party that five times nominated Richard Nixon for their national ticket. If you add up the number of Bushes they've nominated, it's probably another five. So this party is having an internal rebellion. And that rebellion, the more you looked at it, and Theda Skoczporl, as you know, did a wonderful book. She found that the core concerns of the Tea Party were not what the Republican Party used to be about, which is economics and balancing budgets and cutting deficits. It was cultural issues. It was immigration. It was gender issues. It was multiculturalism. what's now called the woke agenda. And so I began to see that there was something changing in the politics. And Bannon and Soros, I think, would all agree that there's some kind of churn that has taken place where we've left the old left-right debate over economics and we've moved into a different world, a different age with a different set of dividing lines. But wasn't that always just a sanitization of the Republican Party. So I've been reading Sam Tannenhaus' great biography of William F. Buckley, and he makes a point that among Buckley's very... people. We just talked about this. So isn't that sanitizing the Republican Party? So I've been reading Sam Tannenhaus' great... I'm retaking this for the podcast. This is this person's fault. Let me do it one more time. It might be more fun to do it as the outtakes. Yeah, right? Yeah, we'll make this a cold open. Doesn't that sanitize the Republican Party, ignore a big part of its history? So I've been reading Sam Tannenhaus' biography of William F. Buckley. And Buckley gets a start very early, before even what we would think of his political career. He's a big admirer of Lindbergh and the America First movement of that age. Then, like, right out of college, he's out there defending Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare and that sort of profound populist insurgency and pressure in the Republican Party. You have, of course, Buchanan in the 80s and the 90s. You have David Duke. There was always this reservoir of interest in this kind of politics pulsing on the side and the edge of the Republican Party. So was it really that, I mean, yes, some Republicans fell in line, but was it just the structure of having gatekeepers? Because it's not that the desire for something like this only emerged in 2016. I think as now a number of the histories that have sort of looked at the Republican Party from this vantage point make very clear, the desire for something like this was always there. The parties, mandarins, and arguably the media were just able to keep a lid on it until this period. But that's precisely the point. I mean, you had on your show John Gantz, whose wonderful book reminds us that, as you say, Buchanan was there, but he was a marginal figure, wasn't able to get the nomination, was able to be an irritant. There was always the switchover from the Democratic Party for the white, southern, you know, kind of old racist vote. But these were all kept in check by the Mandarins, who were largely a kind of country club, business elite that believed fundamentally that economics was the dominant story. And the 08 crash really destroyed the gatekeeping power of that elite. And I think that is part of the big story here. But there is another story, which is that over the last 30 or 40 years, you are seeing a consistent shift of people moving away from voting purely their economic interests and voting more their cultural, gender, racial identity. So if you go back 40 or 50 years, you could predict pretty tightly how somebody would vote based on whether they made more than the median income and were white-collar versus whether they made less than the median income and were blue-collar. And generally speaking, people who were blue-collar voted left. People who were white-collar voted right. And that wasn't just true in the United States. You could go to Europe and you'd find that was the labor-conservative divide. You can go to France. That was the socialist Republican divide. And that has changed, as you well know. Right now, we're in a situation where if you make more than the median income, you're more likely to vote left for the Democratic Party. And if you make less than the median income, you're more likely to vote right for the Republican Party, because the values, the spectrum is no longer left versus right on economics. It's what I call open versus closed, largely on culture on, you know, do you want more immigration? Do you want more multiculturalism? Do you want more trade? Do you even want more open technology? Or do you want all these things closed, closed, closed? Well, let's not leave economics quite yet. I read a statistic in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend that kind of made me want to take out a pitchfork. So the net worth held by the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion in the second quarter this year from $10.7 trillion a decade earlier. So from $10.7 to $23.3 in one decade. That's according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The amount held by the entire bottom 50% increased to $4.2 trillion from $900 billion over that period. So let me just do this. What do you think when you hear that? So I think that we have massive increasing inequality. We have it at a scale that most people are not even able to comprehend because it's really what you're talking about is not, the real story is not about the 0.1%. It's not even about the 0.01%. It's about the 0.001%. In other words, we have essentially the same tax policy for somebody who makes a lawyer in New York who's making $3 or $4 million a year and somebody, a hedge fund manager or a tech billionaire who's making a billion dollars a year. And we have the same tax policy, in fact, a favorable tax policy for the guy who's worth 25 billion and makes nothing in income every year, makes it all through capital gains or borrowing against a stock portfolio. In other words, we have an accumulation of wealth at the high end that is extraordinary. I mean, and it's something that we have, no public policy knows what to do about. As I say, you're taxing the guy who makes $4 million and $400 million the same. But when you ask about this new politics, so let's go to a place like Sweden. Sweden does not have a huge income inequality problem. They have actually done a very good job. They have very high taxes. They have lots of redistribution. Sweden has a major upsurge of right-wing populism that is fundamentally driven by culture and immigration. You say maybe it's that we should have protected our manufacturing sector better. Germany protected its manufacturing sector. The second largest party in Germany now is a right-wing populist party motivated largely by cultural issues. Maybe we should have coddled people with a bigger safety net. Nobody coddles people with a bigger safety net than France. France is percentage, the government, the state percentage of GDP is, I forget, it's like 55, 58% highest in the Western world. And right now, Marine Le Pen, if the election were held tomorrow, she'd be the next president of France. So my point is, these income inequalities and dysfunctions obviously cause enormous anxiety, anger, whatever. But the age we are living in, I would argue, these things get channeled through cultural discontents. And you see that with immigration being the issue that got Trump elected and then re-elected. And Trump is very smart politically. He knows what works. And that tells you that there's something going on here that we're not capturing. An entirely materialist conception of politics, I think, is not meeting the moment. Well, if I were to take this from the more materialist left, I want to spend one more moment on this. I think what they would say is it's that the left parties aren't meeting the moment. So you, I always find it strange how much symmetry you have in political trends across very different countries, right? As you say, many of those countries have, they have different tax structures, they have different economic structures. But one thing they all have in common is that the left in those countries has become a much more highly educated and usually richer coalition. Piketty, with co-authors, has done a lot of work on this, talking about the Brahmin left that has sort of emerged in wealthy countries all across the world. And the argument you'll hear, I don't myself totally buy it, but I would like to hear your thinking on it, is that as these parties have become not the working class parties of the past, but the educated parties of the present, the highly educated parties of the present, that they became what's called neoliberal, that they gave up on the old class struggle. and that as such, the sort of choice on economics muddled. And that led to the class dealignment that you're talking about, where, you know, instead of the Democratic Party winning the working class and the Republican Party winning the rich, Donald Trump won, you know, most voters making less than $50,000 a year. Do you buy that, that it's simply the abandonment of, you know, working class populism among the parties of the left? No, and I'll tell you why. because, and it really helps to have a comparative perspective, and because so much of the time I'm thinking about what's going on in other countries. So look at France. France had no neoliberal revolution. France never had a Margaret Thatcher, never had a Ronald Reagan. The person who was president of France in that period was François Mitterrand, a socialist. France has never had any of the neoliberal revolution, And yet it has perhaps the strongest of the right-wing populist movements. And so I think it doesn't fundamentally get, as I said, the moment we're in. But I do think that there's a very important point it makes. And I try to make this in the book. So if the culture is one piece of this, class is another. And this is something we in America find difficult to talk about. But it is, as you say, the left has become largely populated by kind of an elite professional class, which is the new kind of managerial elite, technocratic, meritocratic elite. And that reality has distanced it from the working class. But why? Because of culture, because they no longer speak or understand or articulate the values of that working class on cultural issues. As you know, Ezra, the polling is very clear. The public is very content with the Democratic Party's positions on economic issues. The place where particularly the working class disagrees with the Democratic Party is not on its economic policies. It's on its cultural policies. So I agree with you that if you're looking for the signal, immigration is often the strongest signal. But if you're looking at the time series, when does the populist surge begin happening across Europe and America to some degree elsewhere? It doesn't quite fit. And this goes to a big part of your book, which is looking at other structural changes. As recently in America as 2012, you know, you have Paul Ryan as seemingly the future of the Republican Party. Very, very pro-immigrant. You know, you have the Republican Party coming out with an autopsy to try to moderate on immigration. It was not a new issue. we didn't just start having immigration across the Western world in 2016. But some things are changing. Around 2012, 2013 is when you have a majority of Americans getting a smartphone. Periods of revolution, and you look at them historically across the book, one thing they often coincide with is upheavals in the communication architectures. The Protestant revolutions follow the printing press. The Nazis and fascism are built atop radio. How do you think about the move to social media, what I now think of as algorithmic media, that happens sort of roughly around the same time in all these countries and seems to coincide with the breakdown of all of those gatekeepers, of those established parties, of the ability to kind of hold any line against right-wing populism? It's a great point, and it's fundamental to it. There are these tidal waves that are changing the world that I try to describe in the book, and technology may be the single most important. It's the kind of the one that begins it all. So if you think, I'm glad you brought up the authoritarians of the 20s and 30s, because they really did play off the invention of radio. And what they used radio for was as a kind of one-to-many broadcast system that was able to create a kind of nationally unifying messages that got across all the small villages and towns that used to have their own little pamphlets and their own little local media, as it were. And that ability to nationalize the message, to centralize the message, to send it across Germany or Italy, hugely important. So if you think about every coup that would take place in the 20s, 30s, 40s, you try to get two places. You try to get the presidential palace and kill or imprison the president, and you try to take control of the radio station. Later on, it became you take control of the presidential palace, and then you would take control of the TV station. So those one-to-many broadcast systems reinforced hierarchy. The one we're in now, which is a highly distributed network system where every node is as powerful as any other, produces the collapse of hierarchy, the empowerment of individuals, the empowerment of radical extreme voices, whether they be a QAnon conspiracy theorist. Anyone can rise if they can create something that produces virality. And that is fundamentally anti-hierarchical. Thank you. I think of your politics as, you know, I would call like roughly center-left. And I cannot think of a single center-left politician who rose since the age of the smartphone, who seems attentionally capable, who's been a star of this era. I can think of many right-wing politicians who have. But you think about Biden and then Harris. You think about Macron. You think about Mertz in Germany. Keir Starmer. In the UK, this has been a period when the center-left in various countries seems completely attentionally outmatched, seems to be having a very difficult time generating its own native talent. Why do you think that is? I think that does get to the class issue that you were talking about. The center-left got very comfortable being the kind of meritocratic, technocratic elite that always had the right answer. You know, the kind of smarty-pants answer that everybody in there would congratulate them on. And the right became increasingly seen as the kind of crazy, out-of-control rebels. And because of that structure, I think the right was more willing to take more risks, to embrace more novelty and new technologies, and to be more disruptive. And Trump obviously is the extreme example of that. But I think it's generally been true that the right has been more willing to experiment, to be risk-seeking, because in the right's image, this might sound odd, given that they control the presidency, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, but they see themselves as out of power. Because what they are thinking about is this cultural, professional elite that they sit outside of. And they are outside of that power. And that means that they've been more willing to, you know, embrace cryptocurrency, embrace unusual podcasters, embrace new medium. And part of it is I think you always, these periods of change always help people who are risk-seeking. And the center-left has been in comfortable ascendancy since the 90s. Think of the Blairites in Britain, the Clintonites in the U.S., then the Obama administration. There was a kind of polished assuredness and certainty with which they were running the country. And by the way, I broadly speaking agree with what they were doing. So I'm not saying that as a criticism, but it does mean you're not going to be the person who upsets the apple cart. And so one argument then is simply that their time is done. If you look at politicians of the left who have commanded attention in this era, you look at Bernie Sanders, look at AOC, and we're here in New York, look at Zoran Mamdani. is part of your theory of this turning of the age, of this new structural period, is that it just requires a new left. It can't have this left of the professional classes, this left of caution and courtesy and etiquette, this left of small ideas. When you look around, many people would argue this is simply a populist age. The populist right is thriving. There needs to be a populist left. And that doesn't just mean a question of class. It's also a question of attitude and not just policy, but attitude towards the system itself. Attitude towards these structures of professional formation that you're talking about. Attitude towards whether this whole thing is worth preserving in such a similar way to what it's been in the past or it needs to be really fundamentally overhauled. I think you put it very well, but I would say that the politician of the future on the left will have to be populist in spirit and tone and that these things are not trivial. This is so much of what makes the message get through and to be seen as not part of this comfortable elite, even if, by the way, you are. You know, Zora Mandani grew up on the Upper West Side and, you know, went to a very good selective school. but his style of campaigning, the everyman folksiness, I mean, I think he was absolutely brilliant on social media. I don't think there is another politician in America who was able to use social media as well as he did and convey the kind of authenticity he did. And that authenticity, I think, you know, buys you. Somebody once said about Bill Clinton's success, if you can fake authenticity in politics, you've got it made. And Bill Clinton knows how to fake authenticity. And I, you know, and I, so I think that some of it is that more than, my concern is that the Democratic Party, whenever it hears the words populist says, we have to go to the far left on economic policy. And that's not what the data shows. And that's not what, you know, the, look, the two successful Democratic presidents since Franklin Delano Roosevelt are Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. You know, they're the two, two-term presidents. What they had in common was they were pretty centrist in terms of their policies. They stayed at the cultural center of the country. Remember, Obama was initially opposed to gay marriage. Clinton gives his sister social speed. And yet they had a way of communicating that told ordinary people, I'm on your side. You know, so I think that a lot of this is not about coming up with some grand economic, you know, social democratic, democratic socialists, call it what you will, a grab bag of policy. It's about figuring out how to connect with people, to put it very bluntly, figuring out how to connect with people who didn't go to college. And the Democratic Party has lost the ability to communicate with people who didn't go to college. And as I say, I think if there's a policy issue, largely it's around issues of culture and class, not economics and technocracy. So I want to get at some of the other kind of structural dimensions you look at. So you write, revolutions can erupt from desperation to despair, as in France in 1789. But a different kind of revolution can originate from a state of abundance. And that is the case of the identity revolution. Tell me what you mean. So most of you have heard of Maslow's hierarchy, right? All human beings start with the needs that are very basic. And then when these are achieved, they begin to ask themselves more about things that I think Ronald Inglehart called post-materialist values. And they start to want to express their identity as a woman, as a person of this origin, as somebody who has this ethnicity, this religion. And what I argue is that in some significant part, and nothing is the only explanation, but in some significant part, this rise of identity politics has to do with having had 40 or 50 years of no wars, no massive upheaval, steady economic growth in the Western world. And you see that when you look at the late 60s and early 70s most dramatically, when after 30 years of economic growth and, you know, coming out for the previous generation, remember, has gone through World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and then you have 30 to 40 years of steady economic growth, you begin to see people's identities, their political identities, defined much more by the sense of who they are. So you have the feminist revolution, coming out of Betty Friedan and all that stuff. You have people identifying much more with their ethnicity, Jewish Americans, Hispanic Americans, all that kind of thing comes to the fore. And so it's not entirely inappropriate to say that it is a product of a certain degree of material achievement. But I want to trace what you're describing by identity revolution here, because post-materialist politics, which is a big part of the story, describes a much broader set of political concerns than what we think of as identity. Post-materialist politics is about the movement towards thinking about the despoiling of the environment, not just the pace of growth and wage gains. It describes, as you talk about the feminist revolution, but it also describes consumer politics and safety in consumer products and all these different things that become part of the everyday life of wealthy democracies starting in the 60s and 70s. we talk about something more specific when we talk about identity politics. And I want to think about that more specifically in two ways, because I think we associate it with the left, and I think you're critical of its form on the left. But right now, I think we're seeing a particularly grim form of identity politics overwhelming the right. And so, first, what are you describing specifically as identity politics, not just post-materialist politics, identity revolutions, not just post-material ones. And what is the form it takes not on the left, but on the right? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, you know, the afterword is almost entirely about the cultural backlash from the right that has been produced by all these changes. And this is a very common pattern. I mean, the most, the easiest one to think about is the reaction in Germany in the 20s and 30s to what people forget was the most liberal country in the world with the most liberal constitution in the world, way more liberal than the American constitution or American practice. And there was this huge cultural backlash from the right that took the form of xenophobia, antisemitism, and of course, anti-democratic backlash. So I think, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I think what we are witnessing is an enormous cultural backlash on the right. And that backlash in some ways, yeah, it's its own identity politics. In some sense, I think Steve Bannon once said this to me. I can't remember whether it was on the record or not, but here I go. He said something to me. He said, you guys, meaning, you know, all you centrists and leftists, You think you're going to win the elections because you're going to bring out all the minorities and women and things like that. All we have to do is to crank up white male voting by 10 or 15 percent, and that'll overwhelm everything. In other words, if we can get whites to act on their identity politics and to weaponize that, you know, remember the country is still whatever, 65 percent white. And that is what you're describing, I think. So this is the theory of Trumpism in 2016. And both sides more or less agree on what's happening there. These famous articles that predate Trump on the missing white voter. But then the way the Trump coalition evolves, Democrats improve with white voters between 2016 and 2020. And Trump improves with non-white voters. And Trump's 2024 coalition is much more multiracial than his 2016 coalition, and it's very particularly built on gains among Hispanic voters. And I think this violation of the political narrative on both sides kind of threw everybody for a loop. But you now see Hispanic voters are swinging sharply towards the Democrats in this year's elections, the ones that happened just a few weeks ago. So polling is showing Trump losing Hispanic voters very quickly. I think after 2024, MAGA convinced itself it didn't need to choose between cruelty to immigrants, a sharply ethno-nationalist vision of the American state, and having a multiracial working-class coalition. Now maybe it looks like it does have to choose between those paths. Yeah, I think you're quite right. So let's go back to the campaign. I think that this is one of the areas where Trump is actually quite intuitively gifted politically because there was an effort effectively to woo these people on the basis of their class identity, not their ethnic and racial identity. But I think you're right that at the end of the day, the ethno-nationalist part of the party, precisely because it has become this working class party of cultural grievances around immigration and things like that, is so large that the policy that they ended up enacting is turning people off. I mean, I'm sure you saw this, but in the recent polls, the most dramatic shift was Asians. It's a 40-point swing, I think, in New Jersey. Asian Americans are back to 75% levels of voting for the Democratic Party. And so I think you're right that they will have to choose. And I wonder whether at this point, this is honestly the left's greatest opportunity. I wonder how much you can do to write this because having done what they've done, I think you have sowed an element of distrust in Hispanic and Asian voters who are going to think, yeah, you can say nice things to me, but then when you get into power, you'll turn ice on my relatives or my friends or people who I could imagine identifying with or who I could imagine myself in their shoes. I think that this one may be a very hard hill for the Republicans to climb again. Creating an opportunity for the Democrats is not the same as Democrats taking an opportunity. You know that? That's what you all clap for? So as you were saying earlier, one thing the Democratic Party, one thing liberal parties around the world have struggled with quite a bit is the question of immigration. And I think they struggle with it because it pits their values against each other. On the one hand, there is a belief in borders. Relatively few members of even left and center-left parties believe in open borders. and at the same time there's a belief in the dignity the value of every person a fundamental respect for people who are risking their lives and leaving their families to create a better life and often a narrative certainly in america this is a country of immigrants my family immigrated here so liberal parties end up in this balancing act and right now what i think they want to do is just rebalance in the other direction we just turn the dial way up on border security That's different than having an actual affirmative vision, a clear description of what immigration is to them, is to a country, what the policy should be trying to achieve. So then if you think that an opportunity is opened up, what should Democrats do with it? What should the liberal position on immigration actually be? That's very well put, Ezra, because I think it gets at sort of what is the first principle approach here? So I think the most important thing people need to understand is that the immigration crisis that the United States and Europe has been dealing with over the last 10 years is very different from the one they were dealing with 30 years ago. So 30 years ago, when you talked about an illegal immigrant, you were talking about people who were furtively crossing the Mexican border by hook or by crook, somehow trying to come in. And if they got in, they would run away from the police because they had to make sure that they were never seen and they'd go into the shadows of the economy. That is not what is happening now. People, when they cross the border, don't run away from the police. They run toward them because they have realized that there was this, I would call it a hole in the immigration system, or there was a mechanism in the immigration system that allowed you to come in and apply for asylum. So what a process that was meant to be for a few thousand dissidents who were fleeing persecution has turned into the primary gateway that people are using, I would argue, to fundamentally game the system. And so you are getting now millions and millions of people who come here and say the magic words, I have a credible fear of persecution. So the whole thing is a disaster. What we have done is we have allowed the immigration process to be taken over by this one loophole that was meant to exist for a small number of people in extreme need because of political or religious persecution. And what you now have are economic migrants. You have cartels that have been built around it. There are places where an entire village will sponsor somebody and pay the cartel so that person can come into the United States and find a way through the asylum process to then disappear. We've got to shut all that down. That has nothing to do with being left-wing or empathetic. You cannot let everybody in. You know, the United States cannot be open to every potential migrant in the world. There has to be a process. There has to be categories. There have to be rules. people have to apply. And so I think we're finally beginning to understand that. And once you do that, you can then have a serious conversation about what is the kind of immigration that we should be in favor of. My own view is that the great battle that the left should be fighting is for legal immigration, to make sure it is maintained, to make sure it's reformed, to make sure it's, you know, it's done in a humane way. Maybe you want to shift the skills versus family unification part of it. We take in the vast majority of people we take in through family unification. There's a very small number who come in on a skills-based system. Most countries in Europe do the opposite. What's happening on the right is you're seeing a big fissure on the right on not illegal immigration, on which of course they are completely lockstack, but legal immigration. So Trump goes on Laura Ingraham and defends the H-1B visa program. And you're taking 80,000 people out of the one million legal immigrants the United States takes every year. It's a tiny number, but it became this flashpoint because there's a large number of people on the MAGA right who want those numbers to go way down. And that would be a fight worth having politically because I think the country, broadly speaking, believes that we have been enriched by immigration, by legal immigration. So the book has a new afterward. and you write in it that, quote, the happiest countries in the world, in Northern Europe, are capitalist welfare states with an emphasis on community and clan, often led by fairly humble, empathetic elites. Perhaps there is a lesson there for all of us. So aside from try your best to be a tiny Northern European country, what specifically is the lesson there for all of us? so one lesson is I think that you can build a decent life for people who are not rich and we do a very bad job at that the great journalist Annie Lowry who happens to be Ezra's wife has written wonderful stuff about how not only do we not provide much support for people who are unlucky in life and are poor or haven't had the opportunities we've had. I believe so much of one's success in life has to do with that kind of luck and opportunities. We make it so hard on those people. First, we don't give them much in the way of helping them move up the ladder. And then we make it insanely complicated, what she calls the time tax. You make it impossible for people to actually get even the benefits that are available. And these Northern European countries, they treat people well, who are poor, but they treat them with dignity. They treat people who are imprisoned with dignity. There's a lesson there, I think, about how to treat human beings in a good society. The harder part to do is there is, in that part of Europe particularly, but more generally speaking in Europe, there is a tie to the community, to the land, to history, to a sense of your life revolving around a certain kind of communitarian identity, that is very hard to replicate in the United States. You know, the United States is this big, brash, churning economic entity where people move, people... There's a much greater sense of, you know, you're always trying to remake yourself. It's the story of reinvention. Everyone is Jay Gatsby at some level. And that turns out to leave a lot of hollowness inside, that leaves a sense of where do I fit in? And I think so much of what has happened in America in the last 10 or 15, 20 years is this growing sense of hollowness, particularly, for example, for men. This is something Richard Reeves talks about a lot. And I think that part of Europe in particular, small, clan-based, community-oriented, has managed to keep that sense of identity and keep that sense of purpose and community. And how you do that, it's in a way the fundamental challenge for liberal societies. Because what liberalism did was it broke away from the certitude of faith, the certitude of tradition, the certitude of community. and it said, you're free to make your own life. And you didn't define your life, the happiness of your life exactly as you want. No priest is going to tell you this. No commissar is going to tell you this. No dictator is going to tell you this. And what people found was they had caused enormous anxiety. You know, Kierkegaard calls, it says, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. And I think we live with that dizziness of freedom in the United States. And that's a harder one. How do you fill that hole in the heart that people get when they're confronting modern life without the certainties of the old? So this has become a popular critique of America. And I have to say that I only half buy it. And as you were talking, I was thinking about an interview I did with Yoram Hazoni, who is an Israeli-based political theorist and sort of the founder of the National Conservative Movement, which I associate J.D. Vance with and others with. And, you know, he would say to me, or he said to me on the show, you know, really when polity becomes over 15%, not the people of its fundamental clan, it begins to break apart. And I thought about the place I'm from, California. And I thought, well, that's wrong. And you think about the place we're in right now, New York. you're telling me, not you but the imaginary national conservative here on the stage that New York City doesn't have identity that it doesn't have a pulse unto itself that it is not a place that people become a fierce partisan of I'm Californian I find the level of fierce New York City partisanship quite irksome there is this strange dynamic where in the places where you have sort of crossed this, what I think the National Conservatives see as some tipping point, at which point solidarity should no longer exist, that the political economy of it does not seem to me to be. That what happens is that solidarity does not exist in that place, that there's no solidarity anymore in Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York City. It's that other places that have not passed that tipping point seem to become somewhat increasingly repulsed and distant from the places that have. That, you know, you have these increasingly divergent urban-rural divides. You have a sense of immigration taking over and destroying places that you don't live in. New York City did not vote for Donald Trump. I think Zoran Mamdani defends New York City's multi-ethnic heart, its fundamental cosmopolitanism, in a genuinely stirring way, as do various Californian politicians. So there's something here that always feels wrong to me because the backlash is not coming from inside the place that is supposedly lost the thing that should hold it together. The backlash is coming from other places that have a growing anger at these centers of cosmopolitan industry and belonging. I like what you're saying, and I think the way I'd put it is the Ezra Klein amendment to Kierkegaard is... Anxiety is the dizziness of somebody else's freedom. It's the guy in Montana looking at what's happening in New York and saying, oh my God, this is no longer my country. Yeah, J.D. Vance calling New York a hellscape. Right, but that is, but here's the point. You have to take this seriously because the gale winds of modernity do produce all this change. You are losing some of those anchors of the past. There's no question the United States has secularized very rapidly in the last 30 or 40 years. And as a national political unit, that means that there is going to be this pushback. And it even, you see this, even in those small Northern European countries we were praising. You are seeing a huge amount of pushback. And I would point out the one left of center successful party, by the way, in Europe right now is in Denmark. The social democrats in Denmark have done very well by sticking to their guns, by being resolutely left of center on economics, but being very tough on immigration and multicultural issues. And so there is a way, I think, to hold that center. So I want to focus on another part of what you said about the Northern European states, which are, in your telling, sort of often led by fairly humble, empathetic elites. So you have degrees from Harvard and Yale. Yes, guilty as charged. You became the youngest ever managing editor of foreign affairs, I believe at age 28. By 2000, you were editor of Newsweek International. So you've moved among American elites for decades now. You've moved among international elites for decades now. You have firsthand experience here. Let's focus on the American ones. How have they changed? I would say, first of all, I have been one of the great beneficiaries of this move to a meritocratic elite. elite. I came to this country literally knowing nobody with the dark skin, weird name to the extent I could figure out what the name was when they realized it was Muslim. That was even worse. So I would still argue that the last 30 or 40 years during which this meritocratic elite came to power, first of all, there's a profound and positive transformation because what it was replacing was a old boys network where what mattered more was whether or not you were a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, what family you came from, what prep school you had gone to, and would we have replaced it with, though imperfect and often gamed, and I accept all the criticism, is much better. I would also argue, I know we're getting a little far afield here, but, you know, the people are always trashing the last 30 or 40 years. Let's just remember what happened in the last 30 or 40 years. You know, communism was defeated. The large parts of the world embraced democracy and liberal values. I just saw this in World in Data, which is a wonderful website. 1.5 billion people moved out of extreme poverty in this period. You had many fewer wars and violence declined, as Steven Pinker keeps pointing out. Not such a bad track record for the last 30 or 40 years. So I think that the rise of the meritocracy is not fundamentally the problem. The problem is this. What ended up happening is the very fact that it was meritocratic started to make people become very smug, very self-satisfied, and believe that they deserved everything they had. After all, you know, X person grew up in poverty, and look, he made it to, you know, to become an amazing financier or a hedge fund manager or a tech mogul. And you begin to think, well, it's all because of my skills and my merit. But then you also begin to think that the person who's at the bottom of the heap also deserves his or her status. You know what I mean? And I think that's profoundly mistaken, because a lot of what helped you was luck, was randomness, was, you know, a lucky break here or there. Or the fact that you have a particular skill that is useful at this moment. I think we forget that and we do become less empathetic. And I do think all of us, myself included, it's very important to remember that the people who have not managed to do as well in society, they just didn't have the lucky break you did. They didn't have the chance you did. And most importantly, they're all human beings created equal. And the way we treat the very poor in this country, I think is one of the greatest shames in this country. So I want to pull you out, as we sort of come to a close of this part here and move to audience questions, I want to pull you out on what that would mean for the next generation of people who want to be in charge, right? You listen to the new right. You listen to people like Patrick Deneen. they are very explicitly engaged in a project of elite formation, right? They're trying to create this new breed of counter-revolutionary nationalist elites. He, Deneen calls his preferred regime, aristopopulism. So, but we have been tracing through this conversation a story of elite failure on the left, failure to be able to communicate in a way that matches the moment. Failure to represent the views and opinions of the societies that these people are supposed to serve. And then ultimately failure to maintain enough trust to maintain the popularity and faith of the systems that they once built. So what would your project be if you take seriously that we're in this age of revolutions, in a new structural era that needs new leaders? if it's not going to be the right's aristopopulists, what should these new leaders be like? So you're quite right to point out that the right is trying to engage in this new project. And what you're seeing, again, if you go back to our original conversation about the core of this being a cultural project, for people like Patrick Deneen, the core of this is an attempt to reshape, remold society so that you bring back some of those old certainties of religion and morality and tradition and community. But the key issue, and this came out quite well in your conversation with him on this podcast, the key issue for him, and you tried to press him on this and he scurred it, is that it is denying people individual choice, autonomy, and freedom. Because at the end of the day for it to mean anything, this new conservative nationalist project is saying, we will force you to have fewer divorces and fewer abortions and fewer gay adoptions and fewer openly gay people, it is an effort to use those ideas to deny people choice, to deny them freedom, to deny them autonomy. And I think in that sense, it is fundamentally going against the grain of history and that the liberal, the Enlightenment liberal project, I believe at the end will succeed because it is in deepest sympathy and resonance with what has really been the greatest aspiration for human beings for the last 500 years, which is to have greater freedom, to have greater choice, to have greater individual dignity and respect. And, you know, what the left should do is try to identify with those aspirations and to find a way to make societies work in a practical, commonsensical way. You know, don't go crazy. But remember that that is your history, that is your heritage, that is your mission. And if you do that, I think if you offer people the alternative between a right that says at base, we are trying to deprive you of that choice, that autonomy, that freedom, and the left which celebrates those things, but in all spheres, like economic, political, social, I think that's a winning message. It's a forward-looking message. It's a message that actually will appeal to young people. The writer Eric Fromm wrote a book called Escape from Freedom. And he says, the real meaning of life is that you get to live it. And what he means is that you, you know, that is the only meaning of life, that you get to live it as you want. And that's a very powerful message, I think, at heart. But wait, the Seros elites on the left were giving that message. If anything, I think from breastfeed analysis, they were giving it too much, right? The sort of critique of this form of liberalism is that it is acid on the bonds of community, acid on the bonds of tradition. So what then needs to be different about that? Look, I think that where the left went wrong is in areas that became fundamentally illiberal. I think that things like the DEI stuff, I think a lot of the woke agenda is deeply illiberal. I mean, I am an old-fashioned liberal in the sense that I believe Martin Luther King when he said, I want my children to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. And to a large extent, what happened was the left started to judge people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character. So I would like to see a return to a celebration of that individualism, that autonomy, that freedom. And as I say, economically, I'm much, much more comfortable with free markets and free trade for that reason. And I'm much less enamored of governmental elites telling me what to do. I grew up in India and I saw all that. I would like to see a much greater emphasis on individualism and freedom, which was at the heart of the Enlightenment liberal project. So that's such a beautiful segue to our audience questions. We got a lot of questions on Mamdani. We're here in New York City. He was just very recently elected. I'll choose this one. How do you think, and I think the how is important there, how do you think Mamdani will deliver on his promises? that's a challenge. Look, I actually would turn the tables on you. The single most important challenge that every city in America faces, almost every city in America faces, and every blue-run city in America faces, is affordability around one central issue, which is housing. and how you're going to get that to happen, it seems to me it's pretty simple economics. If you want to lower the price of something, you want to produce a lot more of it. I have not yet seen the level of ambition that I would hope to see in terms of how you are going to massively change that equation and dramatically increase supply. And this is where I think the left gets caught up in its own problems. You wrote a whole book about this, and at this point we're all so influenced by your book that I'm probably channeling some piece of it. But I think that what tends to happen is that even when the left says it wants to solve the problem, it has a 10-step review committee process, reviewing the review process to make sure that the old rules have been taken down. and Donald Trump just demolishes the East Wing of the White House, right? And I have to say that when I look at that, aesthetically, I was appalled, but I kind of was a bit jealous that, you know, like he just gets stuff done. Whatever he wants to do, I don't agree with many of those things, but, you know, there's something about getting stuff done and actually achieving. So if you want to build housing, figure out how you're going to do it at scale, and only the market is going to be able to do the scale you need. So if you can't solve that problem, in my opinion, everything else is trivial. It's housing that will make all the difference. And on housing, you cannot defy the laws of economics. If you want the prices to go down, supply has to go up. we didn't get to talk as much foreign policy as i always like to talk with you but but i did think this was an important one so we're watching this tremendous shift of american foreign policy to focus on this hemisphere even trump was initially a big pivot to to asia guy but now we're drawing it back in. The invasion is already here. We're going to focus on dominating, as far as I can tell, our own hemisphere. What is the impact of it going to be? This question sort of describes it as the impact on U.S. foreign policy, but I think more the impact on the U.S.? What does it mean to be treating our primary foreign policy problem as both immigration from and relations with the countries to our south? It is a huge shift. What we have gone from is ever since the end of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, the United States has conceived of its role in the world as being the most powerful country in the world, which had an open, expansive, rule-based conception of what the world should look like, and reordering the world around those lines. And what Trump is doing now in Trump 2.0, which is, as you point out, different from Trump 1.0, he's retreating from that. So it's not just the going after these boats in Venezuela to show that you're going after fentanyl, which doesn't come from boats in Venezuela, but anyway. What you're not seeing is, for example, what also happened in the last few days, which is the Trump administration has signaled to South Korea that basically not only can they have nuclear submarines, but they can enrich nuclear material themselves. So for eight decades now, the United States has tried to maintain a system to discourage nuclear proliferation, even among our closest allies. And what we would tell countries like South Korea was, we'll give you all the fuel you need, but don't go down the step because if you go down that step, the Japanese will want to do it. And if the Japanese want to do it, another bunch of countries, and then we will end up in a world where you will have 20, 30 countries that have the capacity to make nuclear weapons. And that is a world of greater disorder, of greater risk, of greater uncertainty. And, you know, we've gotten off so far with nuclear deterrence, and it's worked pretty well. But there have been many near misses, there have been many possible accidents. And imagine a world, you know, a multipolar world, in which suddenly you have 20 or 30 countries that have nuclear weapons and the possibilities for miscalculation, misunderstanding, accidents. So, and that's just one piece of the unraveling of that world. The other one is the unraveling of the global economic order that we had built and sustained and maintained by believing, by being the primary advocate for free trade and for essentially not having politics dominate economics in these areas. What we are now, we have the highest tariffs of any major, you know, certainly in the free world by far. So we far from being the exemplar and model of an open world economy have become the exemplar and model of a closed world economy. So I think these are huge consequential shifts that the Trump administration has put into place. And my worry is that they will have a long legacy, even when the next time, if a Democrat comes in next. Over the years, you've spoken to just a truly enormous number of world leaders, of top policymakers. Who's been for you your most memorable interview? Probably Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore. Mostly you find people, and I'm sure you find this, Ezra, who are in the world of, you know, leaders and heads of state and things like that. They're people who are kind of men of action. And then, you know, you meet another set of very impressive people who are men of ideas. Lee Kuan Yew was this extraordinary combination. He was both genuinely a strategic thinker, and yet he was one of the greatest implementers and executors that you could ever found in the world. He took this sandbar at the tip of Malaysia called Singapore, which was, you know, its only natural resource was mosquitoes. And he has turned it into a country, a small country, but it's absolutely central to the world trading system with a per capita GDP that is today higher than the United States. It's extraordinary. And what he would often say to me when we would talk is the most extraordinary achievement he was proud of was that he had a polyglot population of Chinese, Malays, Indians, expats, and he built a nation out of it. And that there had been no major racial or religious riots for 50 years in Singapore. You know, that was something that he took enormous pride out of. And there's a very strategic and enforced reason it happened. He forced public housing on 80% of the population. They all had to live in multi-ethnic quarters. So imagine, you know, the Johnson administration's fair housing policies, but times 10 and enforced. And so very, very extraordinary guy. And then also final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So given the kind of things we're talking about, I was thinking about what to recommend. And the one book that I have loved and have gone back to over and over is a book by Walter Lipman called A Preface to Morals. It was written in the 1920s during the Jazz Age. And he first identifies, not first, but he identifies very powerfully this problem of modern societies that you lose faith in religion and tradition and community and certainty, and you don't replace it with anything. And it leaves you with a hollowness inside. And it's a wonderful book called A Preface to Morals. The other one is, when we talk about this technocratic elite, meritocratic elite that I am certainly part of, I would point out, Ezra, so are you. The person who wrote about it most intelligently is the great Harvard scholar Daniel Bell, who wrote a book called, I think, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society. and he identified presciently that the future was going to belong to people who had knowledge and that knowledge was going to become the most important determinant of whether or not you were elite or not. And the final one is, you know, again, back to this question of how do you recreate this life, you know, in a modern time? How do you, what do you do to bring back old values? There's a wonderful book called The Lost City by Alan Ehrenhalt, a journalist who went back to Chicago wondering why the Chicago of his youth seemed so community-oriented and what did they do that was lost? And he discovered that it was so community-oriented because everyone was so poor they couldn't move. They all had to go to church because if you wanted to get a bank loan, the bank manager would always call the priest to ask if you had good character. They all used to hang out at the movies together because nobody's houses had air conditioning. You know, and suddenly you realize it was all the denial of choice that made it happen. And in a weird way, it makes you realize for all our problems, you know, we've come a long way. Freed Zakaria, thank you very much. Thank you. Marina King, Kristen Lynn, Emek Kelbeck, and Jan Koble. Original music by Dan Powell and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samalewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Roy-Strosser.
