Fareed who? The world according to Fareed Zakaria

Zakaria has a sharp eye for those little details which many others miss, and it looks more and more as if elections are won and lost on the basis of those little details everywhere in the world

I ask people if they have heard of Fareed Zakaria, and I mean people who read widely and should know. But a surprising number don’t know who Fareed Zakaria is.

He is a widely read and respected Indian-American political commentator, author and journalist, former columnist for Newsweek and now working for the Washington Post

Forbes called him one of the 25 most influential liberals in the U.S. But there are those who think he can’t be pinned down. While he’s seen as a liberal by some, others call him a conservative or radical conservative.

Whether liberal, conservative or radical conservative, he’s always an insightful commentator with a sure grasp of facts, figures, details and a good writer’s ability to define people and events sharply, analytically and concisely.

I was a regular reader of his Newsweek column years ago, and thought it would be useful to present some of his views on Donald Trump and the historical forces which brought him back to power, as expressed in a You Tube interview by the Indian Express. Zakaria has a sharp eye for those little details which many others miss, and it looks more and more as if elections are won and lost on the basis of those little details everywhere in the world.

Today’s world, whether it’s Asia, Africa or Europe (mainly Eastern Europe, but one can find examples in the Western part, too) looks increasingly in favour of authoritarian governments and leaders. Zakaria sees this as a sharp departure from the 1990s, when countries (including in the formerly junta-ridden Latin America) got rid of dictatorships and chose democratic line.

Today, this is no longer the case, with illiberal democracies on the increase. The comeback of Donald Trump is an example. While no one has called Trump a ‘strongman’ or authoritarian, there is no question that he changes the flavour of American politics. As Zakaria puts it, he expects from his subordinates loyalty to him first before loyalty to the country, and he doesn’t respect institutions. Zakaria points out that India under Narendra Modi is another example of this. If the electoral commission doesn’t see eye to eye with the ruling polity, then get rid of the current set up.  He adds that American institutions are strong with many checks and balances. But the Supreme Court now has a Republican majority, and so does the Senate, and one can predict tough battles ahead.

Zakaria doesn’t go so far as former Greek finance minister Yannis Varoufakis, who is another respected author, commentator and  a vowed Marxist who calls US an oligarchy ruled by a single party, making no distinction between the Republicans and Democrats. 

But Fareed Zakaria makes a sharp distinction between the two, and shows how the basic nature and outlook of these two parties changed since the time of Ronald Reagan, when the Republicans were seen as a rich man’s party and the Democrats were for the working class.

Today, this image is reversed. In the background, he goes back to the diminishing of Democracy worldwide. He calls it a Democratic recession over the past seven years. The paradigm has shifted; it’s not the same political narrative and people are not sure where they are going. 

He calls this a backlash against liberal Democracy, with the rise of women’s rights and gay rights. All that has produced backlash; the increasingly gendered nature of voting in the U.S. is a glaring example of this, with women voting overwhelmingly for the Democrats, while men vote for the Republicans, rather, the Republican Party as re-shaped by Donald Trump.

Zakaria calls Trump an intuitive politician who saw what others failed to see, a paradigm shift in voter mindsets over the past decade. He says Trump is a bad businessman but a very good salesman. Trump saw the changes as far back as George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq. He criticised the invasion as a waste of American resources and good men. This struck a chord with the working class (who were the soldiers getting killed in Iraq). They were fed up with foreign adventures and all the high minded talk of re-shaping the world.

Zakaria delicately leaves out the sexism and all the charges of groping etc. against Donald Trump (which could be another factor why many American women vote Democrat). But what alienates women seems to have worked with the opposite sex. Trump won both the electoral and popular vote this time. In 1996, Bill Clinton won the non-college educated vote by 14 points. In 2024, Trump won the same vote by 14 points.

Trump expanded his working class support beyond the whites, luring Hispanics, blacks, mostly men, it seems. People laughed when the Republican National committee had as its key  speaker the wrester Hulk Hogan, the epitome of American male macho. Hogan ripped his T- shirt off on camera. This impulsive gesture worked well with the working class, while Democrats spoke of unisex bathrooms and transgender sports,  Zakaria says that many Hispanic voters became Trump supporters as a result, adding that Trump is a working class man’s idea of what a rich man should be.

For example, he says working class men could connect with media images of Trump and Elon Musk eating McDonalds while flying somewhere. The flight is a rich man’s privilege, but the burgher is the commoner’s food. 

Zakaria does not say anything about the botched assassination attempt, which may also have worked in Trump’s favour, bringing out a deluge of Democrats’ conspiracy theories even by liberal commentators at the time.

As for Elon Musk, Zakaria calls him the most powerful private individual in the world. But he was with the Democrats earlier (he supported Obama), not with Trump. So, what made him make the shift?

According to Zakaria, the Democrats were talking about too many workplace restrictions, which wasn’t to Musk’s liking. Next, President Joe Biden made a ghastly mistake by saying that General Motors invented EV (electric vehicles) in the US, which Musk with his Tesla found insulting. 

It isn’t just the U.S. The whole world must now face the Trump-Musk combination. Zakaria points out that the US has a very powerful symbolic presence in the world. For example, when Narendra Modi was asked why he wanted to raise tariffs, he quipped: Why shouldn’t I? The Americans are doing it.

The world could be in for a rough ride in the coming years. Joe Biden has set the tone with his parting gift to Ukraine, allowing them to use American long-range missiles against Russia from Ukrainian soil.