Transcript: Fareed Zakaria, Author, Age of Revolutions

MR. BOOT: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Max Boot, columnist at The Washington Post, and today I’m pleased to be joined by my fellow Post columnist, Fareed Zakaria, to discuss Fareed’s terrific new book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.”

I have to say this is the book to read if you want to understand the turmoil that is gripping the world today and how we got here and really to understand the last 400 years of history. It's tour de force, and so I'm delighted to be able to talk to you about it today.

Fareed, welcome to Washington Post Live.

DR. ZAKARIA: Thank you, Max. It's a huge pleasure to do this for The Post and a very particular pleasure to do it with somebody who I have long admired, not just as a columnist but as an author. I still remember your first great book, which was a huge revelation to me.

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MR. BOOT: Well, thank you very much, Fareed, and it's a pleasure for me. Having been honored to be a guest on your CNN show a few times, I get to turn the tables and to put you on the hot seat now.

So we have a lot to cover. Let's jump right in. You've said that this book has taken you 10 years to write. Talk about what you were seeing 10 years ago. That would be 2014 when Barack Obama was still president and nobody had any idea that an unhinged real estate tycoon could possibly become president of the United States. What were you seeing in 2014 that provided the foundation for this book?

DR. ZAKARIA: Yeah, it's a great question because I was sort of trying to remember, and I read the original proposal to try to remind myself.

So what is happening at that point is that I'm beginning to notice that politics is getting kind of crazy and seems to be breaking from the familiar patterns of the past. So I was looking at the Tea Party, which was this strange grassroots movement of incredible intensity that was taking over the Republican Party or taking over a part of the Republican Party and particularly the base, and I remember reading a very powerful analysis by the Yale scholar Theda Skocpol, which pointed out that while they would talk occasionally about it being a kind of small government party, that when you actually went out and surveyed them, you talked to them, and you got into the movement, you realized they were basically motivated by class resentment, racial resentment about Obama and the first Black president, hatred of immigrants. It was much more centered around social issues.

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I remember noticing that by 2014, you really could get a good sense of this, that Obama was breaking a historical pattern which had existed for really ever since we had polling, which was that people's views of the economy would tend to be somewhat correlated to the actual strength of the economy and then very tightly correlated with presidential approval ratings. But the economy had recovered under Obama better than any other major economy since the global financial crisis, and yet his approval ratings didn't move much. The stock market triples under Obama's presidency, and his approval ratings don't reflect that reality.

So I'm looking at all this, and I remember reading a lecture that Tony Blair gave in which he talked about how we were moving away from the politics of left versus right to a politics of open versus closed, meaning, you know, openness, globalization, immigration, open markets, open technology platforms, to closed protectionism, anti-immigration, all that kind of thing. And I realized, you know, there's something going on here, and I decided to write the book largely to educate myself and to try to understand, okay, if we are going through this kind of upending of politics, when was the last time something like this happened? And I began to realize that we've had these moments when technology and economics really fundamentally upend the social structures and then the politics are sort of scrambling to make sense of it all.

MR. BOOT: Well, as somebody who's primarily a historian myself, I love the way that you use a historical lens to try to understand what's going on, and you present a really fascinating series of case studies of previous revolutions, some political, others technological and economic, beginning with the Netherlands in the 1600s. And I thought that was an interesting choice because most of us are not that well versed in Dutch history, and when we think about the origins of liberty and we think about the foundations of the United States and the modern world order, most people don't look to the Netherlands, but you do. So maybe you can explain, why do you start with the Dutch? Why were they so significant, and how come the Netherlands is not a superpower today?

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DR. ZAKARIA: You know, I had exactly the reaction you did when I started to look at this. I sort of generally was being thought of Britain as the place you would start, and then I read this fascinating book by Stephen Pincus, a Yale scholar, called "1688." And it's about the glorious revolution in Britain that essentially creates the kind of modern liberal state, liberal democratic-oriented state in Britain, and what the book made me realize is that almost all those British ideas actually were borrowed from the Dutch, who were the most successful economy in Europe in the 17th century, the richest country in the world.

And so I started to read more and more about it, and there's some great work that's been done by Simon Schama and Jonathan Israel and people like that. And what I realized was that the Netherlands really is the first modern country. You know, if you think of the modern history being the break with thousands of years of stagnant GDP and the rise of, you know, kind of human prosperity and innovation and scientific--not just scientific, but engineering innovation, it all begins around the 17th century with Holland, with the Netherlands. And the reason is that it was this highly decentralized part of Europe. Unlike the great landed empires of Europe--France, Spain--it did not have the feudal system, because these were all a bunch of small farmers and tradesmen who had to work together to reclaim the land, which was all swampy and, you know, not very arable. That kind of flat, egalitarian, decentralized structure allowed them to be much more innovative.

In a weird way, it was sort of like, you know, think of the trust fund kids versus the hustlers who have nothing. The Dutch were the people who had nothing, and they innovated and they created this--you know, they invented the tall ships that create globalization. They invent the joint stock corporation, which becomes the Dutch East India Company, which is the largest company in the world, create the Amsterdam stock market, which is the first stock market in the world. And that--all of that creates the first merchant republic in the world.

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Before the Netherlands, really, you basically had courts and kings. Politics was essentially a court affair, and the Netherlands, you start to get the modern idea of politics, which is interest groups, parties, things like that.

And so, in many ways, you know, the modern era begins with the Netherlands, and, you know, you say, why is it not a superpower? But let's just think about how since that time, that is, really since 1600, even maybe the 1570s or so, the Netherlands has been, in per capita GDP terms, one of the richest countries in the world for 500 years. It has been essentially an uninterrupted liberal republican state and soon a liberal democracy.

If you look at the UN's, you know, index of--I forget what it's called, but, you know, it's an index that looks at quality of life, life expectancy, all those kinds of things, the Netherlands has been in the top 10 ever since the index was founded.

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So it's an extraordinary run for a country of 17 million people, and that's the answer as to why they're not a superpower today. They're still, in per capita terms, amazingly productive.

So the largest agricultural exporter in the world is the United States. Do you know the second largest agricultural exporter in the world is the Netherlands, tiny Netherlands? We're 340 million people; they're 17 million people.

MR. BOOT: And of course, we're speaking to each other from a city that used to be known as New Amsterdam.

DR. ZAKARIA: Exactly, exactly.

MR. BOOT: So we have examples of the Dutch even here.

You quote Eric Hobsbawm describing the Industrial Revolution as the most important event in world history, and that's a pretty sweeping statement. Why is that the case, and what does the Industrial Revolution have to teach us about the current Information Revolution?

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DR. ZAKARIA: So I used Hobsbawm's credibility to make that statement, because it is such a breathtaking statement, and I think you can think about it most simply by looking at that graph that's in the--that's in the book, which is average income of human beings from as far back as we can calculate it, which there's a great historian, Angus Maddison, who does it, and he goes back about 2,000 years. And it's basically a straight line. It's a flat line up to about--for 1,750 years, it's about a flat line, and then it just takes off in what we now call it, you know, the "hockey stick graph." It just goes zoom.

And the reason that happens is because of the Industrial Revolution. Per capita GDP has begun to rise in the Netherlands and then in Britain a bit before that, but what really drives it up is the Industrial Revolution. And so you have to think of the Industrial Revolution as the series of changes that took human beings for the first time out of subsistence levels of agriculture and nomadic existence into this world that we have become completely--we take for granted, which is of continuous growth.

You know, the idea that we are going to every year grow--some people worry that it's only growing 2 percent, we're only growing 3 percent. Well, the fact that we're growing at all is a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, and we went, roughly speaking, from about--in Europe, in the West from $400 per capita GDP in about the 15th century to about $4,000 by the beginning of the 20th century, you know, so a tenfold increase. And that has changed our lives. It's created--you know, people don't die of infant mortality. People don't die of diseases. They eat at least two meals a day. They have a roof over their heads, all those things, not to mention then the inventions like electricity and things. So it's just--it is the mother of all revolutions, as I call it. And its impact, you know, has--the shadow has lasted long, you know, far beyond.

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The reason I think it's relevant to our age--and you asked this--is the Industrial Revolution basically scrambled politics in very much the way the Information Age Revolution is doing. At the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the people in favor of the Industrial Revolution were liberals. The people on the left of center, they were for the merchants. They were for the, you know, the individual. The people against it were the conservatives, because they represented land, agriculture, aristocracy, everything rooted in the old economic and political system and its elites.

And over time, what starts to happen is the two sides flip, because the left begins to worry a lot about the distributional effects of industrial growth and capitalism, creating this working class, and it starts thinking about more and more ways to alleviate the condition of the working class. And the right becomes very comfortable with the new elite, the plutocratic elite, the new industrial magnets, the robber barons in America. And so the right becomes pro-industry capitalism markets, and the left becomes suspicious of them.

You can see this actually in a guy I very briefly profiled, John Stuart Mill, who begins his life as an ardent liberal and an ardent capitalist and ends his life as a socialist.

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MR. BOOT: Having laid the historical foundation, you then move on to describe the revolutions that are transforming the world today: globalization, technology, identity, geopolitics. And it strikes me that in a lot of ways, you can sum it all up with one word, which is "backlash," kind of backlash against the economic and political changes that are sweeping the United States and so many other countries.

What's interesting to me is that before we entered this era of backlash, we had this previous era of democracy and liberalism triumphant in the 1990s, this notion that--Frank Fukuyama's notion that history had ended and we were all going to be good liberal capitalists.

So what happened to that? Why did we go so swiftly in the course of a few decades from this age of triumphalism in the 1990s to this age of backlash and liberal democracy being on the defensive?

DR. ZAKARIA: It's a great question, and I think, you know--and this is my speculation in the book--it was just too much change too fast in the sense that--you know, think about globalization. So if you look at in the '50s, the expansion of globalization, a country like Japan essentially comes online into the global economy. And in the '60s, you'd probably say South Korea starts to come online and Singapore and Hong Kong. In the '70s, maybe you would say Chile and Malaysia. And then from the late 1980s to, say, 2005, you have almost all of Latin America, China, India, and large parts of Africa, all coming online, Central and Eastern Europe. So basically, somewhere between 2.5- to 3 billion people suddenly join the open world economy, the trading system. And that is a seismic shock to the system.

Then look at the Information Revolution. I know there are big debates about exactly how big this revolution is compared to, say, you know, electricity and trains and telegraphs. What I would say is that the extraordinary thing about the Information Revolution is because it is about information and because it has been about communication, it is profoundly psychologically destabilizing.

You know, think about Jonathan Haidt's work about what social media and the cell phone have done to people's--you know, to rates of teen suicide and anxiety. I think that the truth is that whatever the economic effects of this, the social psychological effects of it, the Information Revolution, are so disruptive to our sense of ourselves that I think that it really qualifies as a kind of mega revolution. So that happens.

And then you have the Identity Revolution. You know, think about the role of women. Women have stayed second-class citizens for most of human history. You know, some tribe was up; some tribe was down. But women were always second-class citizens. And then in the last 30 to 40 years, that has fundamentally changed.

So if you think about the change of that magnitude, it's probably not surprising that there is a big backlash, because the changes are big.

MR. BOOT: How much of the backlash was driven by elites screwing up? Did the political class get things wrong, or to what extent do you think the backlash was inevitable, just because of the nature of the technological and economic transformation that was going to happen anyway? I'd be curious for your take. To me, it's not clear.

DR. ZAKARIA: Yeah, it's a very interesting and pertinent question.

I tend to think that this much change, this fast was inevitably going to result in a backlash. I know that there is a kind of view on--obviously, there's a view on the right, the Steve Bannons of the world, you know, that the deep state and the kind of liberal and cosmopolitan elites have screwed everything up, and that's why this happening.

There's also a view on the kind of Bernie Sanders' left, that it was the corporate elites and their handmaidens in the Democratic Party and Labour Party in England that hollowed out the working class. I really don't think that stands up to scrutiny, and let me tell you why.

First of all, look at Northern Europe. Whatever we may have gotten wrong, the place that people--the Bernie Sanders' left, for example--idealizes is Scandinavian countries and Northern Europe in general. Well, you know--and inequality has not risen much in those countries, for example. You've not had a hollowing out of the working class, even in a place like Germany. You have right-wing populism everywhere. Sweden has as its second largest party, a party that derives from the 1930s fascist experience. The Netherlands has this xenophobic party that Geert Wilders runs. Geert Wilders is essentially the most popular politician in the Netherlands right now. Germany, which has long had a taboo on right-wing parties because of its history with the Nazis, has now the AFD, which is a full-blown right-wing populist party.

But also, I don't buy the idea that the United States screwed up as badly as it did. It could have done better on distributional issues. It should have distributed more. We should have taxed more and spent more on kind of the losers and all of this.

But let me just remind our viewers and listeners of this. The Eurozone economy and the U.S. economy in 2008 were the same size. The U.S. economy is, I think, now 60 percent larger than the Eurozone economy. If Great Britain were to join the United States as the 51st state, it would be the 51st poorest state in the American Union. Per capita income, average income in Britain is lower than that of Mississippi. So we haven't done that badly in the last 20 or 25 years, even distributionally.

If you take into account income transfers--that is, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, and all that--you have not had stagnation of middle-class income.

What we have had is deep cultural change. In 1975, 5 percent of America was foreign-born. It's now 15 percent. In 1975, about 4 percent of Sweden was foreign-born. It's now 22 percent. Those are the changes. That's where you see the real change.

I think that's what affects people much more deeply is this sense of cultural alienation and cultural change.

MR. BOOT: I think one of the interesting arguments you make is basically--and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're basically suggesting that our current obsession with identity politics is kind of a luxury good, which has been enabled by the overall prosperity of our society, that we're having our material needs taken care of, and so we're able to become agitated about non-material factors, including this identity politics, this identity backlash against the changing demographics of our society. I mean, is that an accurate summation of your view?

DR. ZAKARIA: Entirely accurate. There's a great social scientist named Ronald Inglehart, who ran a kind of survey process. It involved many, many scholars, and they looked at dozens of countries. What they found was two very interesting things that I'll point out. One, exactly as you say, that as countries got richer, what ended up happening is that people's core political identity, which used to be defined by economics, starts to move. And what they start to do is people start expressing what he described as "post-materialistic values." If you think of Maslow's hierarchy, you're first worried about food and shelter, and then you start to think about other things like community and identity. That process tracks almost perfectly with what the 1940s and '50s, when countries were coming out of the Great Depression in the West. It was all about economics. And by the '70s, when you have some basic level of income assured, kind of a mass middle class, people start to think about their identities as women, as Blacks, as Hispanics, as gay, as lesbian, whatever it is, and that this process has happened pretty much throughout the world. That's the very interesting part about it.

And the second point I'd make about Inglehart's work, which I found fascinating--this is in the last five years, his last work--was that America was always this unusual country in the World Values Survey. We were almost alone among rich countries in that our own values relating to--let's call it, colloquially, the three G's--gays, guns, and God--you know, social values. We were closer to Nigeria than we were to Denmark.

In the last five to ten years, the United States has seen the single largest drop in religiosity of any country in the last 20 or 30 years. We have become radically more secular. We are becoming, in that sense, more like Denmark, and the reason I bring this up is it would, again, explain why there has been such a backlash.

What people forget is if that is happening, if that trend is real--and he provides mountains of evidence that it is--it gets a lot of people worried that their world is disappearing, that the world they knew is disappearing, you know, that the kids are being taught new and alien ideologies that are kind of, you know, unmoored from the past.

MR. BOOT: What's the biggest challenge the U.S. faces going forward? Is it the challenge from external adversaries, from the Chinas, Russias, Irans, North Koreas, et cetera, or is it the challenge from our internal disunity, from the rise of the MAGA Republicans, from misinformation, polarization, all these other trends? And, of course, in this book, you look at both of those, but which one do you see as being the biggest threat to our future?

DR. ZAKARIA: They're both challenges. There's no question that the rise of a kind of illiberal China and an illiberal Russia and an illiberal Iran are very real problems, and those countries see themselves as an ideological opposition to the West, not just geopolitical opposition.

But we're very strong. You know this well, Max, because you've been writing about it. I mean, the United States is still the strongest country in the world by far. On economic measures, we're demographically healthy because of our immigration. We produce more energy than--we produce more oil than Saudi Arabia, more natural gas than Qatar.

No, our problem largely--our biggest weakness is at home. We have this completely dysfunctional politics, and look, I don't want to get too partisan but the reality is we are facing a very consequential election in November in which we have the only president in American history who tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, and not just tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power--and forget what happened outside with the crowds on January 6th, which in my opinion was much less important than what happened inside the Capitol--Donald Trump was able to convince a majority of House Republicans to vote against the peaceful transfer of power, to decertify an election that 50 states had certified and 50 court decisions had upheld. Up against that, we have a regular politician, a regular liberal Democratic politician. You may like his policies or don't like his policies, but that's what's at stake. And I think if we go down one of those two paths, I do think it's very consequential to what happens to us, not just in terms of policy. Yes, we'll let down Ukraine, and we'll let an illiberal, nasty Russia, its imperialism get rewarded, but it's what happens to the fundamental character of liberal democracy in America, and being the leading liberal democracy in the world, what message that sends the whole world.

MR. BOOT: You know, I think it's fair to say that the tenor of your book is kind of cautiously optimistic, that you still have faith in America. You still have faith in the vitality of liberalism, but what does it say--I mean, talking about Trump, what does it say that he is neck and neck with Biden after having been, you know, indicted on so many criminal counts, 91, after having been impeached twice, and after having come out as such a clear opponent of our liberal constitutional system, somebody, as you say, who incited an insurrection? And he could very well win the presidency. So why, despite that, do you still have kind of confidence in liberal democracy?

DR. ZAKARIA: Look, you know, you're asking a very tough question, because I've always assumed that Trump and Trumpism was a kind of phase that would pass, and it's not passing. And it's--to me, at some level, I have to confess, it's kind of unfathomable, because it's not even really a political movement. It's a cult. It's a personality cult.

Look at the last presidential--national--Republican National Convention in 2020. There was no party platform. The party platform was a paragraph that said whatever Donald Trump says is the Republican Party platform, that is our party platform, first time in history. There was not a single former Republican presidential nominee or president even invited to the convention. And instead, five members of the Trump family were given prime-time speaking slots.

You know, this is a cult. This is a party cult--I mean, a family cult, not a party. So the fact that it endures, the fact that, you know, anything he says, no matter how untruthful, kind of, you know, gains traction with his--with his flock, the fact that, you know, Truth Social, this company he started, you know, everybody's buying a piece of it, all his followers are buying a piece of it, even though it has $3 million in revenues. You know what I mean? It's just crazy. The company is worth $8 billion with $3 million in revenue. So it has a price-to-sales ratio of 2000, which when you compare it to its competitors, their price-to-sales ratios are something in the range of 10 and 15. You know, so there's something going on here that obviously we're all not understanding.

But I would say it is this deep cultural sense of unease with the world we're going into, a multicultural world in which women have rights and which gay people's identities are openly, you know--not just tolerated but celebrated, you know, a world of open technology, open--you know, with much greater trade with other countries. It's all that stuff. As Tony Blair said, all that openness leaves a lot of people saying, I want to shut it all down. You know, stop the world; I want to get off. And what Trump promises them is that he is going to take them back, you know, to some kind of mythical period, I assume some version of the 1950s, where America was more stable, more white, more male-dominated. It's all a fantasy, of course, but that seems to be the one people prefer to a reality that I think is actually quite amazing.

America today--to me, the most interesting thing is they think of themselves as a party of patriotism, and they hate everything about modern America. And I think, you know, I look at modern America, and I think it's an amazing place.

MR. BOOT: I echo that sentiment. This has been a fascinating conversation. Unfortunately, we're out of time. Fareed, thank you so much for joining us on Washington Post Live.

DR. ZAKARIA: Max, a privilege to do this with you. Thank you. I look forward to your Reagan book. I hope we can turn the tables for that one.

MR. BOOT: I look forward to that as well.

And thanks to all of you for joining us as well. For more of these important conversations, sign up for a Washington Post subscription. Get a free trial by visiting WashingtonPost.com/live. I’m Max Boot. Thank you again.

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