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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone in our spring membership drive trying to reach our goal of 10,000 donors by the end of the drive on Thursday. Two more days. Thank you for being one if you can. We're going to do something different now. You know how we like to talk about history on the show and relate it to the present? Well, we have a special guest who will take us on a 500-year ride through major social changes.

He calls them revolutions that have led us to the America of today. This will begin in the Netherlands in the 1600s, believe it or not, and it will end with our social media habits, our relationship to our identities, even the possible end to the left versus right model that has so defined, our politics and how we think about our politics for generations. Who can lead a 500-year history tour in one book and try to convey the arc of all that social change in one radio segment?

It's Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post Foreign Affairs columnist and host of GPS, the Sunday Global Affairs Show on CNN. His new book is called Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. We'll do this in two parts to follow the framing of the book. Three revolutions from the past that help set up today's world, and then four Revolutions that Fareed sees us in the middle of today, each one in brief, obviously to make it work on a radio show timeline. Let's see if we can do it. Fareed, always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Fareed Zakaria: It's a pleasure to be with you, Brian. I'm sorry I got a little delayed for a second or for a minute or two, but glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: No problem. Can we start with your definition of revolution for this book, because it may not be the kind of revolution that first comes to some listeners' minds like the American Revolution or the Russian Revolution, or the Gandhian revolution of your birthplace India? Define revolution for the purpose of your book.

Fareed Zakaria: That's a very important point. What I am trying to look at are the kind of fundamental revolutions that have endured and reshaped society. What I mean by that is what are the times when we have had these massive transformations of the economy, of the technological basis of society, which then often produce a huge social revolution because it changes the way people think of themselves.

The classic version of this would be the Industrial Revolution, which really changed the world from one fundamentally rooted in agriculture and moved it to one fundamentally rooted in industry. As you can see, that transformation changed people's identity. They went up from thinking of themselves as peasants to thinking of themselves as workers. Those are the revolutions that have really fundamentally and enduringly changed the world.

The French Revolution is the archetype of the one that people think about, but it's really a political revolution where you have a bunch of elites top-down try to transform society. The argument in my book is that those tend to be less successful. Those tend to be more noisy. They generate more heat. Eventually, if you look at most of the Bolshevik Revolution is another perfect example. They ultimately, often fail and either morph into dictatorships with enormous repression or collapse entirely as the French Revolution did.

Brian Lehrer: What about the American Revolution, which people consider to have changed the nature of democracy and almost a global relationship to democracy?

Fareed Zakaria: The American Revolution is very important in precisely the way you defined it, Brian, which was as a signal and symbol for a new kind of politics. If you think about the kind of fundamental social-economic transformations that I'm talking about, the American Revolution didn't do that much. As we, of course, all know that if you look at the South, which was of course, in some ways a huge vast part of the American economy, we kept in place entirely the futile slave-holding structure of the South.

We kept in place largely the feudal structure of the north with the gentleman farmers and the landed elite and the landed aristocrats, all of whom were the only ones who could really vote in the early American republic. The whiskey rebellion was an effort to actually dislodge that elite, but it failed. It's only about 20 or 30 years after that, that you begin to get a real transformation.

I argue that the total transformation of America really comes in the years 1860 to 1880. The Civil War reconstruction and the massive industrialization of America fundamentally transform it. You see politics say America in 1890 was unrecognizable to a Jeffersonian from the 1790s.

Brian Lehrer: Even though reconstruction in the equal rights end failed.

Fareed Zakaria: Yes. What ended up happening is you broke the back of the South of the slave-holding aristocracy but very quickly, they ended up having a new plutocracy and the slaves turned into surfs and many of the defacto controls were kept in place. Don't forget, there was still a very significant effect in terms of the breaking of Southern power, the breaking of the slaveholders' power in the broader political sense.

The South had to be reintegrated into the country on Northern terms, which is we became one nation really in the 1860s and '70s, a very divided nation, but one nation, whereas before that, it really had been entirely separate sphere. The South and North had so little in common.

Brian Lehrer: Let's look back to the beginning of your timeline. The title of Chapter 1 of your book says it straight up the Netherlands, the First Liberal Revolution. How do you mean liberal in that context? What happened when in the Netherlands in around 1600, it's not the first thing that would come to most of our listeners' minds.

Fareed Zakaria: It wasn't the first thing that came to my mind when I started to work on the book. What I mean by liberal is really a liberal in the sense originally that it was defined, which was pertaining to Liberty. Liberalism as been used for most of its history means, protecting liberty, protecting individual liberties, individual rights, creating governments that protect them, therefore, democracies, liberal democracies. That's where the word liberal comes from in liberal democracy.

In America over the last 50 or 70 years, it took on this connotation of big spending, the liberals, and things like that, which in the rest of the world, it does not have that connotation. I'm trying to use the original classical use of the word. The reason I start with the Netherlands is it's really the beginning of modern history. If you look at a graph of average incomes over the course of 2000 years, and believe it or not, we have reasonably good data on this, it's basically a flat line until you get to about the 17th century.

Average incomes, in other words, for 1,700 years don't go up much. They were about $400 average income per year. Then in this little corner of northern Europe, they start to budge up and they start to go up because the Netherlands is the first country to figure out a way to use innovation, technology, human intellect, brain power, rather than simply agriculture or you go invade a country and steal its gold. Rather than extractive industries, it really begins the process of knowledge industries, trade, skills.

It becomes the richest country in the world, and then it exports that model to Britain, which becomes the world's great superpower. Really, if you're trying to figure out what is the great break in history, when did we start to have these rising incomes, rising living standards, all that stuff at the end of monarchies and the beginning of Merchant Republics, which then become democracies, believe it or not, it all begins with tiny Netherlands in the 17th century.

Brian Lehrer: Fascinating. We can't just look at what happened in the Netherlands or anywhere in Europe at that time as progress or liberal though, because colonialism and the subjugation that it brought to so much of the world was part of that political, and economic, and technological revolution in Europe of the time, right?

Fareed Zakaria: Well, that's the central paradox of liberalism really, of classical and of the enlightenment project. These were powerful new ideas that were liberating human beings, liberating individuals, but most of these societies were still mired in racism. They were still trapped by their understanding of racial superiority and things like that. That's why the American Revolution is the one interesting exception because it lays out theoretically premises that take classical liberal ideas and really universalize them. They create the idea, all men are created equal. Now, you will quickly say it didn't act on those premises. Blacks were certainly not equal, and when it said men, it really meant men not women, all true. The American Revolution as Lincoln always said, had the idea, had the seed within it that allowed for that expansion. Look, as somebody who grew up in India, when I was only a generation removed from British colonialism in India, this was always the paradox.

The British had these wonderful liberal ideas, but at the same time, they had this to us or to all of us Indians bizarre and repressive racism, which said, yes but it doesn't apply to you. Part of the story I think of the last 300 years has been the growth of liberal ideas of about equal rights and liberty and democracy applying not just to the Dutch, the English Protestants, Europeans, but actually to all human beings.

Brian Lehrer: Your Chapter 3 is called the Failed Revolution France, the famous French Revolution. For those who aren't paying attention in high school history class, remind us briefly of what the French Revolution was supposed to be about, and then what it was actually about in your progress and backlash, or liberal versus illiberal frame.

Fareed Zakaria: Sure. The French Revolution is very different from the Dutch and the English revolutions that preceded which are really revolutions as I say of economics and technology. The Dutch invent tall ships and they invent techniques of land management, which then produce wealth, which produce a middle class, which then demands more rights. Which creates a merchant republic and a similar pattern finds its way in Britain.

In France, what happens is a very centralized repressive monarchy is overturned by a bunch of political elites in Paris who decide that they're going to decree equality, liberty, quality, fraternity famously, and they try to enact all that. If you will force it top-down onto the country, the problem is France is not a very modernized country. It's still very agricultural. It's very rural unlike the Netherlands and Britain, which had become quite urban. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: At that time, 1700s.

Fareed Zakaria: Exactly. France did not have big cities. It didn't have trading ports in the same way, and so it didn't have a middle class that was aspiring merchant class. None of that was still very futile. You had the Lords and you had the peasants. These ideas didn't quite take hold. What ended up happening is the revolution got more and more extreme, got more radical. The famous use of the guillotine, we are chopping off thousands of people's heads.

Initially, there were the aristocrats, then it became people who were not sufficiently imbued with the ideals of the revolution and basically, became a dictatorship. It ends with Napoleon taking power and proclaiming himself emperor. You see even in its own terms the French Revolution is a total failure, because it begins with the idea of deposing a monarch, and it ends with Napoleon crowning himself as the monarch. Even on its own terms, it was a failure.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking to Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post columnist and host of GPS, the Sunday Global Affairs Show on CNN in our latest history segment, and how history relates and helps to set up today. Here on The Brian Lehrer Show talking to him about his ambitious new book, Now comes Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. We've now taken the short version of the journey in Part 1 of his book called Revolutions Past.

After the break, we'll get to Part 2, Revolutions Present in which Fareed identifies four revolutions that he says are taking place today. Stay tuned and we'll go through those and see how they relate to all our lives right now and to the 2024 elections too. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our spring membership drive trying to reach our goal of 10,000 donors by the end of the drive on Thursday. Thank you for being one. If you can, you just heard the Jerome Greene Foundation spot there. We are grateful to our foundation funders and we need them, and we need all our individual listeners to be individual members too. Thank you for considering it. We continue with Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post columnist and host of GPS, the Sunday Global Affairs Show on CNN, with his ambitious new book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

Before the break, we were in Part 1 of the book called Revolutions Past. Now we get to Part 2, Revolutions Present in which Fareed identifies four revolutions that he says are taking place today affecting people's lives right now, and the 2024 elections too. Fareed, thanks for waiting through the pledge drive break, and welcome back.

Fareed Zakaria: It's my pleasure, and let me put in a plug. I listen to the show often. I have supported it in the past. I think it's absolutely terrific journalism of the highest quality, and I urge everyone to help out because otherwise, this journalism won't survive.

Brian Lehrer: That means a lot to me. Thank you. I'm just going to list the four present-day revolutions first, so spoiler alert. Listeners know the big picture that you're framing, globalization, technology, identity, and what you call geopolitics. Let's start with globalization. At the end of the Cold War 35 years ago, this was supposed to be a liberal revolution that would lift all boats, economic globalization.

Remind us basically of what the vision was supposed to be that qualifies it as a revolution as you define revolutions in your book, and how you see it having gone wrong, because now the left and the right, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to take two symbolic political figures see it largely as a failed experiment.

Fareed Zakaria: Yes, that puts it very well. In 1989, Berlin Wall Falls, and probably the single most important effect of that was not just that communism collapsed, but that there used to be this thing called the open world economy. The free world economy, which was basically the United States, Canada, a bunch of countries in Western Europe. Two or three countries in Asia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and that was it.

Everybody else had a quasi-socialist economy that had high protectionist barriers, or you couldn't take money out, you couldn't invest in other countries. All that was the economy that I grew up in India, that was what the economy looked like. Then what happens after the Berlin War comes down, everybody wants in on the Western open liberal economy. All of a sudden, you see a massive collapse of barriers and an expansion of globalization.

I'm exaggerating slightly because the Chinese open up a little bit more in the mid-'80s, the Indians open up in the early '90s. '89 is just a figurative point. Basically, if you looked at the world in 1985, and you looked at it by 1995, it was unrecognizable. About 3 billion people had entered the open western oriented free market world. That was meant to produce the liberalization of trade, the democratization of politics as you say the rising of all boats.

It was going to create this wonderful world in which all of a sudden we were all communicating, trading, buying, and selling, and it was going to be good for everyone. Now, the most important thing to say about this Brian is, it's mostly true. That is to say if you think about what the world looked like in 1980, or we have many, many dozens more democracies. We have much more wealth that was created. We have 500 million people lifted out of poverty in India and in China and in Africa, mostly in China but in all of those places.

These are the people living the poorest lives. You can imagine under $1 a day have been moved out of poverty. If you look at the US, our GDP, our economy, has roughly speaking tripled in size. It's not that it was all wrong. Here is the problem, was what we didn't think seriously enough about is there are going to be some winners and losers in every country. It is going to be a very disruptive process because the scale of globalization was so large that it's happening much faster than it's happened in the past.

If you think about what I said 1985 to 1995, 3 billion people joined the world economy. If you looked at that same question in the '50s and '60s, well, you would've said Japan comes online in the '50s. Maybe South Korea comes online in the '60s, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia. You have a few maybe 20, 30, 40, 50 million people joining the system. Now we have billions joining it. It's the scale of the change that caused much greater disruption than people realized and the distributional effects, in other words, the Midwestern steel towns and coal mines in West Virginia do very badly. Whereas finance in New York explodes, technology in Silicon Valley and Seattle explodes. A lot of industries in Chicago do fantastically. The big metro centers in America, absolutely boomed.

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Fareed Zakaria: Even a place like Pittsburgh revives itself, but you have real pockets where things go the other way.

Brian Lehrer: Could it have gone better in your view? Was globalization mismanaged by the United States or others, or was the idea utopian in the first place? I hear you, the many people in many developing countries and elsewhere have been lifted out of poverty in this era. Was the idea utopian in the first place and always bound to wind up with stagnant wages for a lot of people in a lot of countries and multinational corporations and stock market investors? You mentioned the finance sector doing so well, that's not something that everybody cheers, right? That sector reaping disproportionately so many of the benefits?

Fareed Zakaria: It's a great question. I think that the way I would put it is I don't know that I would say we mismanaged it because that implies that we couldn't have known the speed and the scale because it had never happened really at that speed and scale before. What I would say is this, I would take a page from something Barack Obama said. When pushing through a trade deal, I think it was with South Korea, he said, "Look, let's be clear, we all understand the benefits of free trade.

It lifts all boats, it grows the economy in general, but there are winners and losers, and we have to use these proceeds, the increased riches to help those who lose out in this." Now, we always say that, but we never really do it. If we keep going down that path, you are going to get resentment and it is going to build. It was actually a prescient speech because that's exactly the problem. We generated more than enough wealth over this 30 or 40-year period.

We are still doing it, by the way, because I'll get to another point. We haven't really reversed course that much. We're still doing it enough to really make serious efforts to invest in the people who are left behind to do the retraining, to do the building of safety nets but we never do because there's particularly in America, a real aversion to the idea of government handouts. This is part of a much longer, bigger conversation about why we don't like welfare states.

I think that's the central mistake, which is if you look at Northern Europe, they have handled it much better than we did because they believe in that. In Northern Europe, I'm talking about the Dutch, the Danes, the Swedes, they have a very free market, in many ways freer than ours. Once they generate the wealth, they then use it and really help those who need.

Brian Lehrer: Social safety net.

Fareed Zakaria: Right. If we had done more of that, I think you'd have less of less of this. By the way, you'd still have problems because a lot of this backlash that I'm sure we're going to talk about is about immigration. It's about another feature of globalization, which is not the free movement of capital and goods, but the freer movement of people.

Brian Lehrer: That brings us to your revolution number three that defines today identity. We certainly have identity politics on both the right and the left. At the same time, an important part of your argument is that what we think of as our enduring left versus right political framework is breaking down and evolving into camps that you would define differently. How does identity politics relate and relate to what you were just saying?

Fareed Zakaria: Sure. One of the things that I discovered in writing the book was, a speech that Tony Blair gave that I thought was very prescient again in which he said, "The politics of the 20th century was defined around a very simple idea, the role of the state in the economy." It was a left-right divide. People on the left wanted more state, more taxes, more redistribution. The people on the right wanted less state, less taxes and less redistribution.

We are now moving into a world where the big divide is actually on a different axis, which is he called open versus closed. In other words, you want a world of open trade, open technology platforms, open societies, diverse, multicultural, or do you want all of that to be closed in some way? Do you want constraints and restrictions placed on all those things? The reason that really does define the new world we're in, is it's not just the economic piece and the technological piece and this is one of the things I found going back all the way back to the Dutch and the English.

Every time you have one of these broad revolutions in economics and technology always also have an identity revolution, because people's sense of themselves changes. Over the last 40 or 50 years, one of the big transformations that has taken place is the rise of cultural identity as a source of political identity. In other words, people in the '50s probably thought of themselves fundamentally as working-class blue-collar or white-collar management, things like that. Today people think so much more about their identity as women, as minorities or as gays, as--

Brian Lehrer: Ethnic groups, religions.

Fareed Zakaria: Exactly. In some ways, this is inevitable in a society getting richer over time because your material wants are more satisfied than they have ever been in history. You begin to have post-material definitions of who you are.

Brian Lehrer: If I can jump in, how it relates to material, your material wellbeing, maybe there's a compelling argument to make for identity politics from what we still call the left. That it's the only way or the most effective way that economically marginalized groups, rights marginalized groups have succeeded in really winning more equality in the modern age. We might like ideally to have universalism rule of the day, civil society in the ways you were just describing, and democracy norms that tie people together in a single standard of justice and economics.

It's fair to everyone equally, more or less. In reality, the argument goes, that hasn't worked for racial and gender and other inequalities, all that well. Identity politics, though, it rubs people who aren't of those identities the wrong way, has pressured changes toward more equal rights, more successfully. The argument would go. Do you think that argument has some merit?

Fareed Zakaria: Yes. Now you are getting to the conclusion of the book where I talk about this and you put it very eloquently. I hope I try to capture some of that in the book, which is all this identity politics comes out of a good place. Particularly for African Americans, it has been very hard to get to equality without asserting identity politics, without demanding it. Also true for other groups. The problem is that when you start going down that path, you're fundamentally engaging in something that is illiberal.

You are saying, we're not going to look at everybody as if there's the same, we're asking you to look at people who are marginalized differently and give them a leg up. I'm in favor of that but the danger is that it ends up morphing into a racial spoil system or an ethnic spoil system. Take college admission as a good example. It started out with all the best intentions in the world, which is we're going to particularly help African Americans get a leg up.

What it had turned into, certainly by the time I was on the board of Yale University was, it was like a quota system where there were going to be these many Blacks, there were going to be these many Hispanics, Asians were rising a little too fast, so you were going to put a cap on them. This is my interpretation of what was happening. I should be clear. Yale would not agree, but it was uncanny how, despite the fact that Asian applications rose fourfold in a 25-year period, the admission rate there was still about 16% of the class no matter--

There was something going on there where we had begun to think of people first by their racial and ethnic categories and second by the other stuff. I would see this every time there was a campus protest, you'd see somebody say, "Okay, let's give the Hispanic Studies Association more money. Let's give the Afro-Am House more money." I would say, "Well, what about trying to do something to integrate the campus rather than creating more and more of these ethnic and racial and religious silos?" To me, that's what's happened to America at large. Where it's not that you don't want to integrate people, it's that in the search to integrate them, ironically, you've separated them more. I think, finally, there's always a backlash when you do something like that. This is in a way, Steve Bannon once said this to me. He said, "You guys can play all your--" meaning, if you're treating me as a hopeless liberal. He said, "You guys can play all your diversity cards and multicultural cards, but you forget one thing, this country is still majority white, and if I can crank up white identity politics, I'll win and you lose."

Brian Lehrer: As they do, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. Last question. We have a minute left.

Fareed Zakaria: By the way, you can understand their argument, which is if you guys play that game, why shouldn't we?

Brian Lehrer: You see the 2024 presidential election as a really important moment in not just politics of the moment, but the arc of history. I think you wrote, "Modernity is at stake and the tensions between liberalism and illiberalism, progress and backlash," right?

Fareed Zakaria: Absolutely. You have a whole movement represented by Trump and the right-wing populace in Europe that is fundamentally opposed to so much of the progress that has taken place in the last three or four decades and is also opposed, in Trump's case, to basic democratic norms. The simplest thing to always remember about Trump is if he had had his way, and Mike Pence had done what he asked him to, he would be President of the United States, not because he won the election, but because he strong-armed his way into the presidency, essentially ruling like a dictator.

Brian Lehrer: Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post Foreign Affairs Columnist and Host of GPS, The Sunday Global Affairs Show on CNN. His new book is called The Age, or it's called Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. Thanks for trying to course through 500 years of history and some political analysis of the moment as well, which is also in the book with us. We really, really appreciate it.

Fareed Zakaria: Such a pleasure, Brian. Always good to be with you.

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