{"id":3302,"date":"2022-04-07T03:01:34","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T08:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/18.217.136.120\/?p=3302"},"modified":"2022-04-10T04:04:24","modified_gmt":"2022-04-10T09:04:24","slug":"fareed-zakarias-problem-and-ours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/?p=3302","title":{"rendered":"Fareed Zakaria’s Problem – – and Ours"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

August 18, 2011<\/strong>, TPMCafe<\/em> and The Washington Spectator<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fareed Zakaria\u2019s Problem \u2014 and Ours<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By <\/strong>Jim Sleeper<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many people defer to Fareed Zakaria\u2019s virtuosity and sheer ubiquity as the neo-liberal consciousness-shaper of the moment. An Indian Muslim by background whose parents have been prominent in Indian politics and news media, he owes a lot of his credibility as a journalist to American civic-republican premises and a generosity of spirit that had some force in undergraduate life at Yale when Zakaria was a student there. (He graduated in 1986, then earned a PhD from Harvard). But now that America\u2019s civic-republican premises and practices are waning, Zakaria\u2019s own recent behavior makes me wonder how well they ever \u201ctook\u201d with him in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At age 28, he was managing editor of Foreign Affairs;<\/em> later, as editor of Newsweek International<\/em>, he began hosting his Emmy Award-winning CNN program \u201cGPS,\u201d where he holds forth now while writing for Time<\/em> magazine. Certainly, he has given America a lot, though often by dishing out more \u201cwisdom\u201d than he takes in return as he weans us of what he considers our democratic naivete.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steely in command of his facts and allusions, he\u2019s as deft as he is disciplined: Asked to assess the Iraq War this year at an inaugural convocation of Yale\u2019s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs (home now of Stanley McChrystal), he said that while \u201cit\u2019s clear now<\/em> that costs outweighed benefits and that anyone who says he\u2019d do it over again is not being honest or is not in command of the facts,\u201d we must remember that South Korea, too, seemed \u201ca big mess, a brutal dictatorship, until the 1980s,\u201d when it stabilized and became hospitable to Western values as well as investments. All the same, he added, we should try to \u201cre-balance American foreign policy away from these crisis centers that are riven by 15th-century feuds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That strikes me as an example of how Zakaria manages to eat his cake and keep it, too, when parsing the movements of the powerful if myopic titans whose policies he so often and so smoothly defends. So it was something of a surprise to see him lose his cool and his command of the human prospect last week, on the Charlie Rose Show,<\/strong> <\/a>in an id-like eruption over the political psychologist Drew Westen\u2019s darkly prophetic, potentially game-changing New York Times essay<\/em>, \u201cWhat Happened to Obama?\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like the 13th chime of a clock, Zakaria\u2019s arrogant outburst not only surprised; it cast doubt on the previous 12 chimes of the centrist, high-Democratic bloggery and flummery that he sometimes superintends as concert master of our national orchestra of high-minded liberal opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Understand first what\u2019s at stake in all this. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama \u2013 a kindred spirit of sorts to Zakaria (though not an immigrant or a Muslim like him, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding) \u2014 was photographed boarding a plane holding Zakaria\u2019s best-selling The Post American World.<\/em> That book had followed another best-seller, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad,<\/em> and both have been translated into 20 languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CNN\u2019s \u201cGPS\u201d stands for \u201cGlobal Public Square,\u201d but Zakaria is a Global Positioning System by himself, a one-man Davos for the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-bamboozling wrecking ball whose directors, grand strategists, investors, and apologists brandish pennants of their \u201cdiversity\u201d as talismans against having to answer to any actual polity or moral code, national or otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He sits on the governing corporation of Yale University, a career-networking center and cultural galleria for the new global elite so memorably (and scathingly) depicted by Chrystie Freeland in The Atlantic.<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (Yale is just now establishing a whole new liberal-arts college in Singapore, a city-state that, as Maureen Dowd<\/a> <\/strong>noted, thinks and acts more like a global corporation than a republic.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Zakaria is also a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, he considers himself enough a Democrat \u2014 and democrat \u2014 to tell the masses, via CNN and Time,<\/em> why the neo-liberal dispensation of Obama, Bernanke, Geithner, et al<\/em> is inexorable and inescapable and why, with public acquiescence to the judgments of such experts, it\u2019ll probably be all for the best, or at least better than any alternative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He assesses that dispensation\u2019s costs, benefits, and (limited) opportunities for democratic mitigations in the style of a grand-strategic memo-writer, his rat-a-tat-tat diction issuing in firm, clear judgments graced with felicitous apercus<\/em>. If he rests, it\u2019s because he\u2019s disarmed all intellectual and moral resistance, at least for the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New Republic\u2019s<\/em> American-politics blogger extraordinaire, Jonathan Chait, teamed up with Zakaria on the Charlie Rose show in a show of force against Westen, who is himself the author of a best-seller, The Political Brain.<\/em> Zakaria and Chait deferred to and praised each another more often than they actually addressed Westen, whom they dismissed as an ivory-tower moralist with no political experience. They dispensed Beltway realism about the filibusters and the fiscal-crisis constraints that supposedly moot Westen\u2019s demand for a President who\u2019ll tell Americans more of the truth about the crisis they face, in an empowering, explanatory, narrative in the manner of FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr., or even Harry Truman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rose opened the show with a clip that showed Obama falling well short of the standard that Westen invokes, the President blaming Congress and not the larger powers to whose tunes it dances. \u201cThis downgrade you`ve been reading about could have been entirely avoided if there had been a willingness to compromise in Congress,\u201d Obama said. \u201cSee, it didn`t happen because we don`t have the capacity to pay our bills. It happened because Washington doesn`t have the capacity to come together and get things done. It was a self-inflicted wound. There is nothing wrong with our country. There is something wrong with our politics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Westen counters that Obama\u2019s account isn\u2019t enough of the truth to be even credible: There\u2019s \u201csomething wrong\u201d not just with our politics but with that global juggerrnaut that\u2019s distorting and, indeed, dissolving it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, manufacturers that have outsourced their jobs and\/or closed their plants were doing fine with, say, a 15% rate of profit before their new, publicly traded conglomerate owners demanded, say, a 22% rate of return. By what God given or natural right? By no right besides a long train of decisions by the corporate bought-and-paid for Congress or the courts and by global market pressures that no polity is permitted to challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Obama won\u2019t say this clearly is a point of Westen\u2019s essay. Drawing not just on his knowledge as an academic psychologist \u2014 as his critics suggest disparagingly \u2014 but also from history, anthropology, and his own substantial experience as a Washington political consultant, Westen writes that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe stories our leaders tell us matter\u2026 because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen Barak Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters\u2026. Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Westen tells the story he thinks Obama should have told: \u201cThis was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out\u2026..\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He sketches the parameters for a solution that Obama should have proposed: \u201cWe will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back into the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such a story, he claims, would have \u201cinoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two-and-a-half years of failed government, idled factories, and idled hands. [It] would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities on both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country\u2026. It would have made clear that the problem wasn\u2019t tax-and-spend liberalism and the deficit \u2013 a deficit that didn\u2019t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative,\u2026 that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut there was no story, and there has been none since,\u201d Westen writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was all too much for Jonathan Chait, who told Rose that Westen\u2019s is \u201ca dramatic overestimation of the power of rhetoric to affect policies in Congress and to affect public opinion. There`s just not a lot of evidence that it has that kind of effect, anything like the effect that \u2014 that he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think liberals have a hard time holding on to power and being comfortable with power and the compromise is held with power,\u201d Chait continued. \u201cI think it`s something in the liberal psyche\u2026. I am not the psychologist here, but liberals turn against every single Democratic President with regularity. That was what the whole Nader campaign in 2000 was about, this fury that Clinton was a sell out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNow we`ve had a President who`s been vastly more successful in advancing the liberal agenda through Congress and you`ve got liberals angry again\u2026. But the anger at Obama to me is just sort of baffling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zakaria, no slouch at reductio ad absurdum<\/em> in combat with liberals \u2014 and a near-screecher whenever he has to talk about leftists \u2014 outdid Chait, even while siding with him:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJonathan is entirely right but he doesn`t go far enough for my purposes. As Jonathan says in a very brilliant blog post, [Westen\u2019s] is the version of the American presidency you get from Aaron Sorkin in [the movie] \u201cThe American President\u201d: The President gets up, and makes this incredibly moving speech which is, of course, deeply liberal. The entire country cheers and all of a sudden all the problems that are \u2014 that he encounters are waved aside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou remember, in the movie, of course, it was gun control and environmentalism that was the big problem. Now, the idea that if Barack Obama were to give a speech on gun control, suddenly he would be able to, you know, wave aside the Second Amendment and the \u2014 settled convictions of a large percentage of Americans is \u2014 is we would recognize nonsense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe reality is that Obama is working within a very constrained political environment,\u201d Zakaria continued, citing Obama\u2019s accomplishments against great odds; \u201cI`m a little hard pressed to see what the great liberal betrayal has been other than from some kind of fantasy version of liberalism where the American \u2014 you know, finally a Democratic president comes in and America becomes, I don`t know, Sweden.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Little of this had anything to do with Westen\u2019s argument, and as the discussion got down to political specifics, Chait and Zakaria went on about the filibuster and the self-interest of members of Congress, blaming them and the American people, not the President.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, Rose asked, \u201c\u2026.Yes, [Obama] had a difficult Congress to deal with, but if he had a different set of skills and was less of a conciliator, might he achieved more? That`s the question that Drew raises.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chait:<\/strong> \u201cI don`t think that`s right. He only had four months in which he had 60 votes in the Senate. Other than that period, Republicans were committed to blocking his entire legislation no matter what, pretty much even if it included ideas that they had once endorsed. The President just has very limited tools at his disposal\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rose:<\/strong> Drew?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Westen:<\/strong> \u201cWell, I will say that I have more empathy for the President now after feeling like what it`s like to have a filibuster proof super-majority of two against one.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Westen disposed of the filibuster argument: \u201cPresident [George W.] Bush never had the size of the Senate behind him that President Obama had when he walked into office and that he then had three months later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd President Bush \u2026.got through \u2018No Child Left Behind,\u2019\u2026 tax cuts \u2026. heavily weighted towards the wealthy. He got through an unfunded Medicare plan that gave lots of money to Big Pharma. He got through an unfunded Iraq war, an unfunded Afghanistan war. And where was the screaming about the deficit then? Where was the screaming about the filibuster?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBy January of 2009, when [Democrats] could have changed the rules in the Senate, [they] chose not to\u2026. They knew who they were dealing with. Obama certainly knew who he was dealing with after the first couple of times of banging his head against the wall and realizing, wait a minute, these are not Rockefeller Republicans. So why didn`t they change those rules? Why didn`t he push them to change those rules?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zakaria <\/strong>changed the subject, going back to blaming the people. \u201cLook, the American people\u2026 they want jobs. They want the budget deficit cut. They, by and large, don`t want much taxes, many new taxes other than on the very rich. They don`t want Medicare cut, they want Social Security preserved, they don`t want the interest deduction on mortgages to be taken away but they want many large cuts. You know, this is a conglomeration of incompatible desires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd, to Drew`s point again, why is Obama worried about this? \u2026. We have a budget deficit that is 10 percent of GDP. It`s the second-highest in the industrialized world. We have a gross national debt that will approach 100 percent in three or four years. So, you know, we`re not in the 1930s when \u2014 when government debt was minuscule in comparison. We can`t just say let`s spend $5 trillion jump starting the economy and see where that gets us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[This] does not show that Obama has been captured by bankers, He is properly concerned that there is some outer limit about how much you can spend and therefore a long-term deficit reduction plan is the right thing\u2026.. : I think sometimes being a conciliator is being a leader, particularly in a divided country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Westen:<\/strong> \u201cDo you really think, though, that what we need right now, when we`ve got a Tea Party dominating the House, is someone who`s trying to conciliate people who you`ve just said a minute ago can`t be conciliated?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zakaria:<\/strong> \u201cDrew, Drew, the stimulus package, such as it was, passed by one vote. The idea that if you had added on another $400 billion it would have sailed through, I mean this is what he could get through\u2026..\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Westen: <\/strong>\u201cWell, I actually was asked by the leadership of the Senate to help out\u2026 with Wall Street reform. And one of the things that [we] said was, \u201cLook, do what the Republicans did to you: call votes. If you`ve got 59, call a vote, and \u2026 you say, look, we`ve got us voting for Main Street, we`ve got them voting for Wall Street.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHarry Reid did that, I think, three days in a row and the 60th vote was there [because some Republicans, frightened by the public criticism, defected.] That was what could have been done\u2026 with the stimulus, but was not done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd in fact, at that point the President had 80 percent popularity of the American people\u2026 He had 57 sure votes in the Senate,\u2026 an overwhelming majority in the House. \u2026.I never thought I`d ever say anything good about George W. Bush \u2014 but you do what George Bush did,\u2026 you go over the heads of members of Congress\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd you say to [the moderate Maine Republicans] Susan Collins and\u2026. Olympia Snowe, \u2018Listen, the story is that 750,000 people a month are losing their jobs right now. I want to show you\u2026 a picture of a little girl who just lost the room in her house that was taken away from her. If you`re going to vote against this stimulus package, I`m going to make sure that when we get 58 votes or 59 votes tomorrow, the American people are going to hear about why it is that they`re still losing 750,000 jobs a month.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd I`ll bet you it would have taken three votes that he would have gotten the stimulus package he wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was at this point that Zakaria, seeing that he wasn\u2019t going to crush what he\u2019d thought was an ivory tower moralist, lost his composure. \u201cLook I \u2014 what I would say, and I`m not going to get into the what-ifs of a professor, you know, who has never run for dogcatcher advising one of the most skilful politicians in the country on how he should have handled this. It`s a \u2013 \u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rose intervened, saving Zakaria from himself: \u201cThe former would be you and the latter would be President Obama? \u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zakaria, deft on the uptake, trying to right himself, said, \u201cYes, exactly. The whole idea that all of us who`ve never run for anything have you know, have \u2014 can brilliantly explain how to maneuver another $400 billion through the Senate. You know, maybe. Maybe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut I will say. maybe we would all agree [that] it isn`t clear what you can do. You are facing a very serious economic crisis\u2026.. a very deep jobs crisis\u2026. It`s happening because of globalization: It`s happening because of technological change that is causing companies to be much more productive. It`s happening because of a degradation of educational skills of the American work force. It`s happening because of this huge de-leveraging that`s taking place which is making all businesses less risk-seeking\u2026..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo I`m also a little uncomfortable with people who have facile answers if only he would have waved his magic wand. \u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oops, again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rose, again:<\/strong> \u201cI don`t think anybody`s arguing that there`s a magic speech to be made. I do think people can make a legitimate question, which is, Did this president exhibit the kind of skills that he may or may not have that would have produced a different result at various stages in his presidency? These have to do with leadership skills\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A day after the show, Zakaria scrambled to cover his gaffe in two blog postings that tried to slam the lid down on it. At 6:35 am on the Saturday after the Thursday night show, he posted on his CNN blog, under the headline, \u201cWhat Liberals Fantasize About\u201d:<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThursday night I was on Charlie Rose talking with Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University and Jonathan Chait, a senior editor with The New Republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDrew wrote a provocative article in the New York Times<\/em> called \u2018What Happened to Obama?\u2019 It\u2019s a scathing critique of President Obama\u2019s leadership. Then, in a brilliant blog post, Jonathan Chait called Drew\u2019s argument a fantasy\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHere\u2019s a lightly edited excerpt of our conversation where I discuss the fantasy of liberals and why many need to grow up.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Zakaria edited his transcript of the show heavily, dishonestly. His excerpt is 1588 words long; the actual Rose transcript of the same portion of the show is 5700 words. Zakaria\u2019s version obliterates Westen\u2019s arguments about the missed opportunities in Congress and other political specifics, along with Zakaria\u2019s own condescending response to the professor who\u2019d never run for dog-catcher. In the last half of Zakaria\u2019s version, he and Chait end up talking to each other as if Westen weren\u2019t right there on the show. \u201cVisit CharlieRose.com for the full video,\u201d Zakaria advises piously in a note at the end of his post, knowing that few who\u2019ve read his version will bother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In another blog post, this one for Time,<\/em> Zakaria frets that \u201cThe air is thick with liberal disappointment. In the days after the debt deal, liberal politicians and commentators took to the airwaves and op-ed pages to mourn the agreement. But their ire was directed not at the Tea Party or even the Republicans but rather at Barack Obama, who they concluded had failed as a President because of his persistent tendency to compromise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs the New Republic\u2019s<\/em> Jonathan Chait brilliantly points out, this criticism stems from a liberal fantasy that if only the President would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry. In this view, writes Chait, \u2018every known impediment to the legislative process\u2013special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion\u2013are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, Zakaria compounds Chait\u2019s own reductio ad absurdum<\/em> and contempt for what Westen has actually argued: \u201cThe disappointment over the debt deal is just the latest episode of liberal bewilderment about Obama,\u201d Zakaria writes, characterizing Westen as \u201cconfused over Obama\u2019s tendency to take \u2018balanced\u2019 positions\u201d. Zakaria argues, falsely, that Westen suggests \u201cthat his professional experience\u2013 he is a psychologist \u2013suggests deep, traumatic causes for Obama\u2019s disease. Let me offer a simpler explanation. Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist who understands that in a country divided over core issues, you cannot make the best the enemy of the good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zakaria then intones that \u201cwhile banks need better regulations, America also needs a vibrant banking system, and that in a globalized economy, constraining American banks will only ensure that the world\u2019s largest global financial institutions will be British, German, Swiss and Chinese.\u201d He writes that Obama understands \u201cthat Larry Summers and Tim Geithner are smart people who, in long careers in public service, got some things wrong but also got many things right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This seems to have been written by someone a bit too defensive and full of himself to respect his readers\u2019 intelligence. Sure enough, Zakaria pulls out the elite card:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cObama\u2019s temperament was eloquently expressed by the late Bart Giamatti, a former president of Yale and former baseball commissioner, when he urged students not to fall prey to ideology from the right or left\u2026 \u2018My middle view is the view of the centrist,\u2019 he said, before quoting law professor Alexander Bickel, \u2018who would \u2026 fix \u201cour eyes on that middle distance, where values are provisionally held, are tested, and evolve within the legal order derived \u2026 from the morality of consent.\u2019\u201d To set one\u2019s course by such a centrist view is to leave oneself open to the charges, hurled by the completely faithful of some extreme, of being relativistic, opportunistically flexible, secular, passive, passionless \u2026 Be of good cheer \u2026 To act according to an open and principled pragmatism, to believe in the power of process, is in fact to work for the good.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ah, well. I understand the temptation to wax a bit nostalgic about the wisdom of the Yale president of one\u2019s undergraduate years, as Zakaria has done here. I\u2019ve sometimes done that myself in praising Kingman Brewster, Jr., a descendant of the minister on The Mayflower<\/em>, who gave a Yale honorary doctorate to Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964, when that was a very controversial, not centrist, thing to do. (Giamatti got his own real doctorate the same day).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If it\u2019s enlightened \u201ccentrism\u201d we\u2019re looking for, Brewster bucked more than a little alumni resistance when his gesture helped to draw King into the center of his time, a center that otherwise might not have held. Now that our own center is imploding, what would Zakaria do<\/em> about it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He and other apologists for the Democratic Party\u2019s neo-liberal paradigm probably haven\u2019t expected to end up looking like the \u201cold Blues\u201d who protested Brewster\u2019s honoring King. But they\u2019re beginning to sound like charter subscribers to the Beltway dog and pony show\u2019s crackpot \u201crealism,\u201d its feints toward an American pragmatism that has succumbed to the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-defrauding premises it no longer questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some dimensions of philosophical pragmatism may actually weaken or distort civic-republican affirmations like Westen\u2019s and, with them, real movements for social justice. What, for example, is pragmatism\u2019s defense against those like Zakaria who confuse the hubbub of free-markets with democratic deliberation and celebrate global capitalism itself as pragmatic, anti-absolutist, inherently democratic, and historically liberating?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The American historians Christopher Lasch and Jackson Lears have warned that the wealthy and powerful sometimes cling not to the old racist, nationalist, or religious nostrums that most people associate with power but to swift market currents that assume the benign mantle of pragmatism even as they destroy the communities and values on which many people depend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Zakaria hails as \u201ccentrism\u201d becomes, in his hands, little more than an excuse for elites who are wreaking such destruction and are seeking desperately to rationalize it. (No one lamented this more, by the way, than Zakaria\u2019s hero Giamatti, who described a university president\u2019s life as that of a fund-raising song-and-dance man).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, adopting such rationalizations does involve telling national governing elites certain hard, \u201cpragmatic\u201d truths that do have to be reckoned with. At Yale\u2019s Jackson Institute, Zakaria told his audience that \u201cA billion people now do jobs that American middle class and workers, blue and white collar, used to do.\u201d And he doubted that either political party could do much about it. Once, Americans had all the capital and the know-how, he said, but, now, other peoples \u201chave the resources, and they know how<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The audience was silent in gloomy acquiescence, but why? Zakaria\u2019s interlocutor on stage, Yale President Richard Levin, an economist, opined that a bigger stimulus might have a more redemptive multiplier effect on the economy than Zakaria allowed, and that is only the beginning of what ought to have been said. Neither man questioned the rules of the game under which corporations have evolved, not only on their own initiative but through decades of jurisprudence that amounts to an extended lie the United States has been telling itself about the nature of its economy and of itself a republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a story for another time; suffice it to say here that an alternative narrative \u2014 even a \u201ccentrist\u201d one that Giamatti and Brewster might have endorsed \u2014 would ask whether and now the rules of global capitalism need to be rewritten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other times and places, people with the integrity required for such a challenge led unarmed, seemingly powerless, yet deeply sensible and well-organized movements that, against all expert and elite expectations, brought down vast-national security states anchored in injustice \u2014 apartheid South Africa; the segregationist regime of the American South that even Clarence Thomas called \u201ctotalitarian;\u201d the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe with a minimum of armed conflict: \u201cHow many divisions has the Pope?\u201d Stalin once quipped. When Pope John Paul II stepped off a plane in Warsaw, greeted by a million unarmed Poles, Stalin\u2019s successors got their answer. The best explanation of this kind of power is in Jonathan Schell\u2019s The Unconquerable World<\/em>. I commend it to Zakaria and Chait for a long, slow reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the places it worked was, of course, British India, two decades before Zakaria\u2019s birth. But is there a nerve or bone in his body that responds sympathetically to such movements?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice,\u201d Westen writes, \u201che did not mean that we should wait for it to bend\u2026.. He\u2026 knew that whether a bully hid behind a [policeman\u2019s billy]club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Zakaria spoke darkly about the professor who\u2019d never run for dog-catcher and who thought he could wave a magic wand, I thought I saw the face of a bully\u2019s consigliere<\/em>. Our one-man Davos, usually so camera-ready and composed, morphed into something almost cadaverous, a caricature of a bewigged Tory chiding Levelers. He did it again on his own CNN program, telling \u201cliberals\u201d to \u201cgrow up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Westen wants is \u2014 in his own words, in the Times<\/em> essay<\/a> <\/strong>that deserves re-reading at the end of this discussion \u2014 is \u201ca clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative,\u201d one that explains \u201cthat our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so that they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be heartening to see Zakaria, Chait, and other writers \u2014 who have more freedom than presidents, yet who seem driven to defend the corporate state and the Democratic Party in their present forms \u2014 form their own mouths around the following words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The global casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-bamboozling juggernaut may feel inexorable and inescapable to most of us. But for that very reason it is becoming illegitimate and is unsustainable. Our responsibility as writers is to help to develop public narratives that pose the right questions and possibilities.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Westen\u2019s courageous essay is especially<\/p>\n\n\n\n

gratifying to me because, when he was a freshman in a Harvard expository writing class I taught in 1976, he recounted a story, worthy of the movie \u201cThe Insider,\u201d about his own father\u2019s brave but suppressed efforts to get the tobacco company where he worked as a research scientist to come clean about the health risks of its products. I can\u2019t help wondering if Zakaria would have overlooked or minimized those risks had he been around at the time when Westen\u2019s Dad was trying to air them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obama himself has written of his debt to \u201cthe prophets, the agitators,\u2026 the absolutists\u2026. I can\u2019t summarily dismiss those possessed of a similar certainty today.\u201d Why can\u2019t Zakaria and Chait write that, too, especially when the \u201cagitator\u201d is as reasonable and sophisticated as Drew Westen? What drives them to portray him as some kind of naif<\/em> or crank? Was it the long list of talking-points rebutting Westen that the White House reportedly issued the morning his essay appeared?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pundits have circled their wagons, but \u201cThought is not, like physical strength, dependent on the number of its agents,\u201d Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America<\/em>. \u201cOn the contrary, the authority of a principle is often increased by the small number of men by whom it is expressed. The words of one strong-minded man, addressed to the passions of a listening assembly, have more power than the vociferations of a thousand orators\u2026.. Thought is an invisible and subtle power, that mocks all the efforts of tyranny.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And of tyranny\u2019s deniers and obfuscators, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dear Fareed, Jonathan, Barack: What seems inexorable and inescapable to you ma seem illegitimate and unsustainable to millions before long. The more that reasonable truth-tellers like Drew Westen take their stand against it now, the fewer cranks, agitators, and absolutists you\u2019ll have to contend with later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I really suggest re-reading Westen<\/strong><\/a> and, instead of nit-picking and deriding, connecting with the arc of justice as other unlikely but transformative movements in history have done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

_____________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From The New Republic\u2019s <\/em>list of \u2018overrated thinkers\u2019:<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“FAREED ZAKARIA  is enormously important to an understanding of many things, because he provides a one-stop example of conventional thinking about them all. He is a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle. He was for the Iraq war when almost everybody was for it, criticized it when almost everybody criticized it, and now is an active member of the ubiquitous \u201cdeclining American power\u201d chorus. When Obama wanted to trust the Iranians, Zakaria agreed (\u201cThey May Not Want the Bomb,\u201d was a story he did for Newsweek<\/em>); and, when Obama learned different, Zakaria thought differently. There\u2019s something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment. Most of Zakaria\u2019s appeal is owed to the A-list aura that he likes to give off\u2014\u201cAt the influential TED conference …\u201d began a recent piece in The New York Times<\/em>. On his CNN show, he ingratiates himself to his high-powered guests. This mix of elitism and banality is unattractive. And so is this: \u201cMy friends all say I\u2019m going to be Secretary of State,\u201d Zakaria told New York<\/em> magazine in 2003. \u201cBut I don\u2019t see how that would be much different from the job I have now.\u201d Zakaria later denied making those remarks.”<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

August 18, 2011, TPMCafe and The Washington Spectator Fareed Zakaria\u2019s Problem \u2014 and Ours By Jim Sleeper Many people defer to Fareed Zakaria\u2019s virtuosity and sheer ubiquity as the neo-liberal consciousness-shaper of the moment. An Indian Muslim by background whose parents have been prominent in Indian politics and news media, he owes a lot of his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3302"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3527,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3302\/revisions\/3527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}