Fareed Zakaria Makes Sense of a Crazy World
Lynn Thoman
Columbia University prof, host of 3 Takeaways Podcast, a top 2% global podcast.
Massive, mind scrambling changes are taking place in society and politics these days. Nobody makes more sense of it than Fareed Zakaria. Listen, as he talks with his typical brilliance about the problems with our political parties, the need for open markets, how to fix the U.S. Supreme Court — and why he believes enormous optimism is justified.
Politics gets scrambled along new lines
One sign of a revolutionary age, according to Fareed, is that politics gets scrambled along new lines. Here, he shares how:
"If you think about what we've been going through over the last few decades, enormous changes in terms of the massive expansion of globalization, the steady rise of immigration to the levels that we've never seen before, except in the late 19th century. If you think about the information revolution, how it's transformed work so that people who work with their hands become much less valuable and people who work with their minds become much more valuable to the market economy. All this produces a great deal of change, a great deal of uncertainty, great deal of flux in the world."
"One might think that people will say, well, move left because people are going to offer me programs, assistance, tax credits, retraining, whatever. But what it does psychologically is make people feel, my world is going away. The world I grew up in is going away."
"And I want that world back. And the right appeals to that kind of cultural nostalgia. It's not an accident that Donald Trump's slogan is, make America great again."
"The most important word is again. It's a promise to take you back to before your world was upended by all these forces. And in a way, that's a much more deeply satisfying idea and feeling than somebody saying, well, you know, the world is changing a lot. You can't do much about that. But here are three programs I've come up with that will help you adjust to this world."
Political parties are just shells
"Fundamentally, we have done something very strange to our political parties. We took away their primary function. The primary function of every political party is to choose a candidate."
"The secondary function, you could say, is choose a platform and then raise money around it. We've really taken most of those functions away from the parties. The primary system means that the 10 percent that is most extreme, most engaged in each party chooses the candidate."
"That, by the way, is a unique system. No other advanced democracy in the world does it this way. Every other democracy, the party, through some internal means, chooses the candidate and then presents it to you for the election."
"We have an election before we have the election. What does that mean? That means that the party elders, party officials, senior party members lose power, and party activists, extremists, the people on Twitter, the people who go to primaries, they gain power."
"The people I mentioned, the party elders, tend to be mainstream. They're politicians. They've been elected by broad constituencies. They represent, in a sense, the center of the political spectrum."
"The people who vote in primaries tend to represent the extreme. It's been a very bad trade that we've made. It means that the party is really now a shell, as you say, within which political entrepreneurs act."
"If you can raise the money and you can gain attention, you become important. I'll give you one example. In the old days, the way you became prominent as a Congressperson was you gained expertise, you went on big committees, you gained legislative achievements, and that made you famous."
"Today, the way you become famous is you go on Twitter, you go on cable TV, you raise money, and that becomes your fundraising mechanism. You have people like AOC and Matt Goetz on either side, neither of whom have any legislative accomplishments, but they are great on Twitter. They're great on social media."
"Those are the stars of the Republican and Democratic Party."
Additional structural ways American government exacerbates partisanship
The Supreme Court - "that is completely unique at this point. We are the worst in the world, if I can be completely blunt."
"There's no other system where the appointments are as nakedly political as it is in America now. And by the way, all these other countries learned from America that they should have an independent Supreme Court. The U.S. was the first to have an independent Supreme Court with judicial review."
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"But now, the way a typical democracy, advanced democracy, does it, there's usually some kind of fairly complex process by which a Supreme Court judge is appointed. There tends to be perhaps a panel of legal experts. There are some politicians on it, but a lot of independent legal experts on it."
"They will propose a series of people. That process then has to be ratified by the legislature in some way or the other. It's all designed to actually produce people at the center or people who are less partisan and less politically oriented."
"In our case, we actually accentuate the politics of it all. These positions are seen as kind of gifts of the president, and then the Senate has to ratify, and it's done entirely on party lines."
For more, Fareed Zakaria makes sense of a crazy world and the massive changes reshaping our world and our politics, check out
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