Fareed Zakaria Thinks Steve Bannon Got One Thing Right

26:39And then when these are achieved, they begin to ask themselves more about things that I think Ronald Engelhardt 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 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.

27:50So you have the feminist revolution coming out of Betty Friedan and all that stuff. You have people identifying much more with their ethnicity, the 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 and what we think of as identity, right? Post-materialist politics is about the movement towards thinking about the despoiling of the environment, not just the pace of growth and wage gains.

28:38It describes, you know, as you talk about the feminist revolution, but it also describes consumer politics and, you know, 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.

29:18And 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.

30:06And 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, is 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 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.

30:53All 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.

31:40And 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. 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.

32:32Now 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.

33:17I 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 right 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.

34:11I 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.

34:25You know that? That's what you all clap for? You know. 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.

35:15So 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 the liberal position on immigration actually be that's very well put uh as well because i think it is you know it gets at to sort of what is the first principle approach here so the 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.

36:07So 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.

36:46So 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.

37:30You 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.

38:06And 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 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.

38:55So Trump goes on Laura Ingraham and defends the H-1B visa program. You're taking 80 ,000 people out of the 1 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.

39:55So 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.

40:54I 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 know, 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.

41:29The 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 a 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.

42:16that 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.

43:01And 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 are confronting modern life without the certainties of the old?

43:41So 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.

44:28You'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.

44:54There 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 it have. That, you know, you have these increasingly divergent urban-rural divides.

45:44You have a sense of immigration taking over and destroying places that you don't live in. Right? 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.

46:35I like what you're saying, and I think the way I put it is the Ezra Klein Amendment to Kierkegaard is... It is the... Anxiety is the dizziness of somebody else's freedom. Right? 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 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.

47:19And as a national political unit, that means that there is going to be this pushback. And 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.

48:09So 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. 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.

48:54When 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 criticisms, 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.

49:35Let'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.

50:27After 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 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.

51:10And 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.

51:41So 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.

52:18So, 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 rights of aristopopulists, what should these new leaders be like?

53:06So 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 Dineen, 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, right?

54:07It 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.

54:55You 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.

55:39And 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.

56:20I 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.

56:56I 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?

57:28That'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.

58:12And this is where I think the left gets caught up in its own problems. You know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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.

58:56but 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.

59:42We didn't get to talk as much foreign policy as I always like to talk with you, 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 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?

1:00:37It 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.

1:01:17but 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.

1:02:08And 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.

1:02:56What 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.

1:03:39Mostly you find people, and I'm sure you find this, Ezra, who are in the world of, you know, the 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 find 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.

1:04:26It'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.

1:05:07And so very, very extraordinary guy. And then I'll ask your 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 Lippmann 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.

1:05:47And it's a wonderful book called A Preface to Morals. The other one is, we're talking 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?

1:06:33How 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.

1:07:08You 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.

1:07:50Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, 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 Royer-Strosser.