Lawfare Daily: Revolutions and the Rule of Law

[Intro]

Fareed Zakaria: We don't have a lot of recourses to go to, because so many of the checks were institutional. Congress was meant to do something about this, but it's not written in the Constitution that it has to.

The President is not meant to call the attorney general and direct him or her about what to do, but that's a norm, and it's a norm that developed after Watergate.

Michael Feinberg: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Michael Feinberg, public service fellow with Lawfare, here today with Fareed Zakaria, anchor of CNN's “GPS” and the author of “Age of Revolutions.”

Fareed Zakaria: In some ways, we have a more informal and weaker set of constraints and checks and balances now compared to many European countries, which learned from us, and in the fifties, sixties, and seventies enacted into law those checks and balances.

[Main episode]

Michael Feinberg: Today we're talking about Fareed's new book, “Age of Revolutions.” We're going to be discussing how revolutions, intellectual, cultural, and political have affected society and the rule of law throughout the ages.

Now this book has an afterword, which makes very clear that it has some applicable lessons to our current moment, particularly in light of the 2024 election and what's occurred since the inauguration.

But the research and writing took place before that outcome was determined. So, I was hoping you could give us a little bit of the background on what the genesis of the topic was, and how you came to write this particular work.

Fareed Zakaria: Sure. And it actually started a long time before. I mean, from, in its conception, it really began in 2012––2011, 2012––when I started to notice something that seemed very strange, which was the rise of the Tea Party.

And what was interesting about the Tea Party was it was an insurgency within the Republican party. And the Republican party tended to be thought of as very hierarchical, you know.

It was the more traditional of the two parties. It was dominated by a, almost a kind of canonical sequence of candidates that would be elected, would be nominated and renominated.

The old line was always the Democrats have to fall in love with their presidential candidate. You know, think of Kennedy, Obama, Clinton. The Republicans have to fall in line. You know, they're just as, like, the next guy who's––you know, I mean, this is a party that nominated Richard Nixon five times to its presidential ticket.

And suddenly you had this bottom-up insurgency that was tearing the Republican party apart, that you remember the period, the cavalcade of speakers that have to resign.

And I thought, something is changing about politics more generally. And I started to look into it and found that what I was seeing everywhere was this shift. And it was a shift that was really about a change in the basic concerns that had been dominating political parties.

So if you think of the 20th century as basically a contest between the right and the left about the role of the state in the economy, that would predict for you almost all political contests of that period.

So, you know, almost everywhere, what you had was working class voters, blue-collar voters voting left of center, white-collar workers, richer voters voting right of center. And the left wanted to tax more, regulate more, redistribute more, and the right wanted the opposite.

But now you were seeing it was all getting mixed up. Suddenly the Tea Party was mostly working-class people, and they were taking over the Republican party. Meanwhile, the Democratic party had become more and more a kind of white-collar, professional, educated party.

So I said to myself, why is this happening and when has it happened before? My instincts are always to go back to history because I believe, you know, nothing is new under the sun. We are, we're always, there are some echoes of what has happened before.

And so I go back and start to look at periods like ours, of tremendous economic, technological, and social change, and asked myself, what was the politics that came out of it?

And that's what, you know, what the book produced, which was a sense that every time you have these massive accelerating changes forward, you always get a backlash.

And interestingly, the backlash often has, while it has strong economic basis, it takes on cultural forms. People start to feel like their world is being turned upside down and they want to go back to the way things were. You know, make America great again.

The “again” is the most important part of that slogan. It's a politics of nostalgia set against a fast-changing world.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. One thing that's worried me about our current era to a certain extent is when I see the sort of historio-cultural based nationalism, what it really reminds me of is the Völkisch movement in late-19th century Germany. The sort of stuff that, you know, Herder and Vico would later write about.

And, you know, all the historical cases I'm aware of, there seems to be a real turn inward in the polity that's affected.

Given that, and given that Trump very much ran on the Make America Great Again slogan, in which he was really talking about domestic policies and domestic culture, is anything he's done on the global stage––we've seen more military adventures or misadventures in South America than we would've expected, we've seen an emphasis on trade deals––do you think there's any tension between what he promised his voters were going to be his priorities versus how we're conducting ourselves on the international stage?

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah, it's a great, it's, first of all, it's a great historical point. The period I agree with you that seems most similar is actually the late 19th century.

I mean, it gets really, it gets really bad in the twenties and thirties. And that is another period, particularly the thirties, of backlash against globalization, against immigrants, against Jews, all that.

But you know, in its softer form and it's––in some ways the parallel is more accurate is the late 19^th century rise of those conservative nationalist movements, some of which tend to be tended to be quite controlled, if you want to say.

Bismarck and Disraeli found the electorate was feeling the sense of cultural anxiety and unease, and they appealed to them with a certain kind of patriotic conservatism.

And then there were others, Karl Lueger in Germa––in Austria, and people like that who became, who turned it in, who weaponized it and made it much more hypernationalist, and particularly in those days, antisemitic.

That was the coin of the realm. When you wanted to sort of say to people, I am, believe in blood and roots nationalism, it, there was always a kind of antisemitic tinge to it.

And so, you know, what our version of it is obviously––and it's a different kind and I don't think Trump is in any sense antisemitic––but there is a similar kind of conservative nationalism and an anti-globalism.

So that gets us to the question of, you know, whether there's a contradiction here. And you're right to, to point to something. Because I think, here's the tension: Trump is a kind of strange character who represents many strands within this movement, but he's also a person, and a personality.

And he loves to strut the world stage. You know, he loves being the kind of most important leader of the most important country in the world. And therein, I think, lies the tension. Because on the one hand, a lot of what he's doing is straight out of the old fashioned nationalist playbook. It's protectionism, turning inward, anti-immigration stuff, immigrant bashing, more hemispheric stuff, less concerned about the world abroad.

But he loves––you know, as he keeps pointing out, he wants to make peace everywhere. He wants to be seen as the guy who is bringing peace in Africa, in the Middle East, in South Asia, of all places. Taking credit for things that he, you know, as far as we can tell, had very little to do with.

And that part of him clearly occupies a large part of his ego and his headspace, but I don't think his base cares for that at all. And you can see in Vance the more true expression of the MAGA ideology, which is much more akin to these historical perils we've been talking about.

But look. You know, you have had that too in history.

I mean, you had all the tendencies we were talking about, and then you got a kind of crazy king in Germany, Wilhelm II, who was himself like a kind of guy who wanted to strut the world stage and wanted to show off and show Britain that he had a bigger Navy than theirs and all that kind of thing.

And then that, in some way, was a material part of World War II. But at its core, I think Vance represents MAGA’s ideology in a purer form than Trump, who is a little bit all over the place just because he's Trump.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. It's funny that you mention Bismarck and Disraeli as the two sort of historical reference points, because I agree with you on both of those for very different reasons.

His ideology and his sort of cultural conservatism that is really unmoored from any sort of conservative policy is very similar to Bismarck. But at the same time, he really has Disraeli’s, sort of, peacocking affectations of wanting to be at the center of attention.

And there's a real contradiction there, quite frankly. And it does seem like Vance is sort of the next leader who tries to resolve this.

Fareed Zakaria: Exactly. And I think what both the Israeli and Bismarck got right was that in moments of great cultural anxiety and change, the working class can be appealed to on the basis of nationalism, patriotism, you know, almost a kind of blood and soil ideology.

And that that could work even better than the left's attempt to appeal to them on the grounds of working-class solidarity, you know? And so Trump has been very good at figuring out how to appeal to a multiracial working-class audience, not by promising them, you know, economic freebies, you know, tax the rich, any of that.

In fact it’s the opposite. He gives tax cuts to the rich, he cuts Medicaid. And yet he's able to appeal to these people.

How? By this blood and soil kind of national solidarity. And that's pure Bismarck and Disraeli.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, and it's worth noting that the very phrase “culture war,” it's something we lifted from Bismarck. Because he expressly talked about a Kulturkampf when he was trying to build his coalition during the unification of Germany.

And this isn't a new technique. This wasn't born with Pat Buchanan's speech when George Bush got nominated. This is something that really goes back to the aftermath of the early to middle 19^th-century revolutions.

And this is probably a good point to move from abstract talk about history to your book in particular. And your book is interesting in that it can sort of be bifurcated into a historical account for the first half, and then the second half in the application of those lessons to trends in current day political science.

And to the extent we can sort of classify works of history, the academy used to be very big into demarcating different schools. You had social history, you had intellectual history, you had diplomatic history, military history, and there was always sort of a changing tide of fashion in that.

And if I had to classify the first half of your book, I would probably use the term intellectual history. How have ideas changed over time, and how have those ideas, when put into practice, caused mass movement? But because I had that inclination, I was rather surprised when the first historian you cite is actually Marc Bloch, who most people know from his work in the French resistance.

But before that, he was a stalwart of the Annales School in France, which for those of our listeners who are not as deep into this stuff, was a method of historical interpretation that very much relied on what I'm going to probably inaccurately call intractable factors. Things like geography, the location of a nation-state, this sort of setup that humans have little control over.

And then later in the book you allude to, a couple times, Eric Hobsbawm, who was probably the most able and intellectually rigorous of the 20^th-century historians who were really influenced by Marxist analysis.

And I'm curious: both those thinkers have a sort of deterministic, almost, philosophy of history that one normally doesn't associate with the history of ideas.

So I was wondering if you could sort of just talk about how you approached the historical field in general when writing this book, and what sort of schools of thought you would say you subscribe to the most?

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah, that's a very, that's a very profound question because it raises kind of really the question of––it's almost epistemological, of how do you study the world? How do you look at the world?

So I come to it partly, you know, you would detect something real because I come to this as a social scientist more than as a historian, and so I'm always looking for exactly the question you're asking.

How much of what we see in the world is determined by some great forces that are shaping the world, and how much of it is determined by the accidents of history, a personality, a particular leader, a particular moment that went one way or the other.

And so I find that the structural historians––let's put Bloch and Hobsbawm in the same category, the people who talk about the underlying structures––there's a very powerful case to be made that they're able to make, you know, that there are these very large realities that determine the shape of these societies or the shape of the world.

So, I, the way I'd like to think of it is, I sort of start with that, and then I layer on, you know, okay, there are these structural realities, but then there are these moments that make a huge difference in terms of how a society goes.

And the point I was, would be using Marc Bloch to make––which is I think a very important point in human history and in western history in particular––was the dawn of capitalism and trade, and how it transformed societies, how it transformed the West, how it transformed Europe.

And what Bloch reminds us and paints this wonderfully vivid picture of Europe in the Middle Ages, was that the entire society was organized in completely non-market, non-transactional ways. It was a, it was, you know, medieval society was essentially a kind of, you know, feudal system where the aristocrats, the landowners ruled. The peasants underneath, had deep obligations up to the landowners.

The whole thing existed as a coherent system. There was––it was all relationships and power. No transactions, no agency. You know, there was no, no market transactions that took place. The peasants did what they did for the for the landlord because they owed him that fealty.

And then comes global-, you know, capitalism, trade, globalization in its modern form, and completely upends that old, that society. And so that was why I was using Bloch.

And you are right with Hobsbawm, the reason I use him is because the biggest change in human history, I would argue, was the Industrial Revolution. And that seismic event probably changes more about human history than anything else.

And you know, so when you're beginning to talk about the, you know, the effect it had, and what 19th century politics looks like, that's the tsunami. That’s changing everything.

And then you have to try to understand how each political leader at the time tried to navigate through that tsunami of change. But to go from a world of peasants and farmers to a world of workers and industrialists and merchants, which was what happened essentially between 1800 and 1900 in all of Europe.

That's the big change. And Hobsbawm, as you know, understood it and described it better than anyone else.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. I am very much not a Marxist by any stretch of the imagination, but for any listeners who read the book we're discussing today that Fareed wrote, and want to learn more about the topic in the area, you could do much worse than Eric Hobsbawm’s four-volume history of modern europe.

The, I mean, the most germane volume would be “The Age of Revolution” that we're speaking about now.

Fareed Zakaria: But I just want to say one thing about Marxist, because you raised an important point that nowadays, in today's world, you know what, Hobsbawm’s Marxism in his history––he was also a practicing Marxist and a and had incredibly, in my opinion, stupid and irresponsible political views––but his Marxism in his history meant he paid a great deal of attention to the changes in the economy, the changes in technology, the changes in what Marx used to call the base and how that affects politics, what Marx called the superstructure.

So it's, it is really nothing more than a very intense focus on if the entire nature of the economy changed, how did society change?

Michael Feinberg: So let, yeah, I mean, I agree with that characterization of Hobsbawm on all fronts.

I would actually extend it to most of the historians of his school. I think, I think his teacher was Taylor. If they weren't in a student-teacher relationship, I know they were contemporaries who had a very similar, rigorous approach to economic and status-based history that led to some pretty irresponsible political opinions in contemporary times.

We could talk about this for hours. I'm fascinated by the debate. But I do want to get back to your book. And I want to unpack everything you just said, because I think it really gets to the gist of the arguments you're making, not just about history, but about the revolutions you cover and their applicability to the present day.

And you really focus on, to use a different historian's terminology, you sort of start with the transition from status to contract. From a society based upon non-economic hierarchal relationships, to one where economic change and advancement fundamentally changes society.

And you don't start in the usual place. Most of these sort of histories start with 1789 in France, or 1848 in various European locales. You start during the golden age of Holland. I was wondering if you would sort of explain why you thought that was the best place with which to begin your narrative.

Fareed Zakaria: You know, you bring up such an interesting point, because I was thinking of starting with France.

And then the more I read and the more I researched, I realized, you know, we have a tendency, all of us in life to focus a little bit more on failure than on success.

So we look at the revolutions that went awry. You know, I think about it when we think even the term revolution, we think French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Chinese Communist Revolution, it's all these cataclysmic events.

But really, the extraordinary revolutions that took place before that, the Dutch Revolution, which creates the modern Dutch Republic, which becomes the richest country in the world that invents modern globalization. The British who, you know, create the most peaceful, constitutional, enduring political system that then also dominates the world economically for 300 years.

Those we think less about because, you know, they're not, they don't end up with the guillotine. They don't end up with the Soviets taking over, you know, Russia.

So I sort of almost went backwards and found myself, you know, looking at––I'll be honest, I thought I was going to start with Britain in 1688, the Glorious Revolution, as being this extraordinary peaceful construction of a liberal constitutional political system.

And then I started to read more deeply and I was very influenced by the work of Stephen Pincus, who was a, was then at Yale, I think he's now at Duke, who did wonderful, exhaustive research and made you realize that almost all British ideas about modern economics about, even about politics, in large part came from Holland, came from the Netherlands.

And the Dutch were really the beginners, the inventors of modernity in politics and economics. They have a republic. They don't have, you know––it's the first, it's the first important example of a break from the old politics of kings and courts and things like that.

And they succeeded wildly. And that is really the beginning of the, the breakaway that Europe makes from the rest of the world. You know, if you look at that simple graph that Angus Maddison does, the great economic historian, of per capita GDP over, you know, from 1000, it's basically a flat line.

And then it starts to nudge up when Holland breaks out. And the Netherlands starts to actually be making real progress in terms of per capita GDP. And then Britain.

This is called the small divergence. And then you get all of Europe adopting it. And then you see this hockey stick graph. And that's the Great Divergence, where Europe finally breaks out of, you know, millennia of poverty.

And all of it starts, really, with the Dutch Republic. The, you know, the creation of a modern society based, as you say, on contract and individual rights and capitalism and trade, rather than status and hierarchy and power.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. It's funny, when I first studied the American Revolution in depth, as an undergrad and then later in law school, every single professor or instructor I had always tried to drive home the point that what made the American Revolution so special, so different from other revolutions, is it was the only one that did not result in a terror.

You didn't have a Robespierre, you didn't have a Stalin, you didn't have a Cultural Revolution or a subsequent Gang of Four.

Reading your book, I realized, that's actually wrong. There's quite a few revolutions that do not result in utter societal chaos and bloodletting.

Fareed Zakaria: Yeah. We think, as I say, we think of the failures, but we forget the successes. And we tend to focus a lot on the American one because it's familiar to us.

But as you know in the book, I make the point that the American Revolution is an odd one, because it's mostly a war of independence with some elements of a revolution thrown in.

What America fundamentally does is break with Britain and break with the political system of a monarchy and create a republic. And that is a huge, seismic, world-historical change. But what it doesn't do is change very much at all about the social structure that America lived by.

It accepts slavery, accepted the entire plantation system of the South, which was essentially feudal and anti-modern. It even accepted the quasi-aristocratic system in the north, you know.

Other than Shays’s Rebellion, which doesn't, which is a failure, there's never an effort to reorder the social relations in the United States.

What it is is a break from Britain and a break from monarchy. The real social transformation of America happens with industrialization and the Civil War.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, I mean, we should point out, Shays’s Rebellion was not just a failure. It was fairly brutally crushed by the very individuals who had organized and fought the original revolution.

So there definitely is a conservative element, but your description of the American Revolution sort of cuts against the grain of a lot of other commentators on it.

And I find it curious. You rely a lot on Bernard Bailyn, whose “Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” is––inasmuch as there is an infallible classic in the historical realm, that's one of them.

But his most famous student is Gordon Wood, whose take on the American Revolution. And its political and social effects is actually quite different than yours.

Fareed Zakaria: Correct. So yes, we are really getting into the weeds here, but this is actually you are pointing out the most important debate about the origins of America and its political system.

And these are the two great, great scholars. I have to confess that when I read Gordon Wood, the, his classic book on the Constitution, “The Creation of the American Republic,” it is the most compelling account of the creation of the Constitution and the constitutional system.

But when he engages in the debate with Bailyn, I feel as though, you know, Bailyn has the more powerful, persuasive argument about the strong elements of continuity. And by the way, Edmund Morgan at Yale would've made a very similar argument, I think.

And Gordon Wood is sort of, there's almost, I can, I want to say, but there's a kind of an American patriotic you know, cry. “But no, we were different. We were more radical. We were more egalitarian than that.”

And I appreciate that. I've always been very influenced by historian at Harvard, whom, when I was a student there, I came to admire greatly. Richard Pipes.

Pipes was a conservative, but wrote the most important history of the Russian Revolution. And I say, he was a conservative anti-communist, but also, and also, but also a great historian. And he said to me once––and he wrote this in one of his books, you know, generally speaking, the established mainstream view of history and historical developments gets things about right.

And then professors need tenure. And they start dissenting. And they start revising. And the revisionist history always adds an important element of clarification, but if you're trying to understand the actual story, very often the first, you know, the first big interpretation, it is you're sort of getting at 70% of the truth.

Which I think is the way I would describe Bailyn and Wood. Bailyn gets, you know, in, in terms of––and particularly if you think about this by looking around other countries, what is striking about the American case is the extraordinary element of commonality between free revolutionary America and post-revolutionary America. You know, when you think about the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, things like that.

And the colonists, of course, say this in the Declaration of Independence. What they want is a return to what they regarded as the rights of Englishmen that were granted to them by the English Constitution, which George III, this horrible, evil usurper of power had abrogated. They wanted, you know, to get back to the Tudor contract that they had been promised.

And I think that really does get at a very powerful part of the American story, which was that there was a, you know, there was a very strong common law tradition that America was able to preserve through the Revolution and into the 19th century.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. In that sense, you can almost see the American Revolution as less a revolution and more, sort of, a counter-reformation against the excesses of George III.

Fareed Zakaria: That's how we describe in the Declaration of Independence, you know?

Michael Feinberg: Yes. So I'm glad you mentioned your time at Harvard, because I think this actually offers us a bit of a good segue to talk about the latter half of your book, where you diagnose the upheaval in contemporary American society, which institutions seem to be remarkably unequipped to deal with.

And the reason I bring up your time at Harvard is I believe you studied under Samuel Huntington for at least part of your time. And he's sort of unfairly known almost solely for his work on civil-military relations. But if you actually look at the bulk of his output, he wrote a lot about the interplay between historical institutions and political institutions and outside forces.

And I think what we're seeing now, and you really get at this in the afterword to the new edition of your book, is so many of the institutions, which we thought were really unassailable in America––whether it is an independent media, or the three branches of government as independent entities, or the majesty of the law as epitomized by the larger law firms––they're really showing their foundations to be much more susceptible to change than I think any commentator would've thought possible.

I was wondering if you'd be willing to sort of hypothesize as to why that is.

Fareed Zakaria: I think you, you raise a very important point, and I think you're right to point out that, you know, there, there, these institutions just turned out to be a good bit more fragile than we thought they were.

And it relates to the point we were just talking about. So, the United States has many––many of the elements, the core elements of the American political system rest on a kind of common law tradition, which involves norms and procedures and, you know, certain deferences and certain institutional expectations, but are not written out detailed in the law or in the, you know, in the Constitution in, in kind of very specific ways.

So you take the power of the president, right? The power of the presidency is kind of vague. It's Article Two. Article One very clearly is the power of Congress, and it clearly suggests that the Congress was meant to be the main branch of government.

As you know, in the first go around they created a republic, you know, a Constitution, and the Articles of Confed––so, so weak that it almost collapsed.

And then they create this system where, okay, Congress is number one. Presidency is number two. President's main job is to faithfully execute the laws. But it has this vague term which says the executive power rests with the president. And that, you know, then kind of grew because of various things, and it became larger and larger.

And the Cold War then creates a kind of permanent imperial presidency, as Arthur Schlesinger called it. And that happens, you know, Nixon, Watergate, Vietnam. And you have a whole series of ways in which these powers are curbed, but again, very much with an expectation that there will be checks and balances.

You know, Madison believed that Congress would always play the role of checking the president's power, because that, you know, Congress had this power, and its institutional, bureaucratic prerogative would always be to push back against the President.

And I think he probably thought the courts would do the same. Certainly John Marshall did.

And after Watergate––I mean, Watergate and Vietnam suggests the system has broken down. The president's, you know, as we remember, very care––that incredible line when Nixon says “if the president does it, it means it is not illegal.” Meaning the president can do whatever he wants, you know, in his power as president.

So we put all these constraints on the presidency, but many of them are, again, constraints by norm, by practice, right? And what Trump now represents is the breakout phenomenon, because what Trump has said is, ‘I'm going to try and assert maximal presidential power. I will force my party, which controls Congress, to accept a completely subordinate status.

He apparently jokes that he's actually president and speaker of the House all rolled into one.

I will bully the courts by both threatening not to obey, you know, rulings, and in various ways pushing the limits of that approval. And I will interpret the executive power to, to the absolute maximum extent it can. You know better than I, there's a, you know, whole theory called the unitary theory.

And what's fascinating to me is we don't have a lot of recourses to go to, because so many of the checks were institutional. Congress was meant to do something about this, but it's not like written in the Constitution that it has to.

The President is not meant to call the Attorney General and direct him or her about what to do, but that's a norm. And it's a norm that developed after Watergate. You know, before that, the president had appointed his brother as Attorney General in the case of Kennedy, and the president had appointed his campaign manager, as president, in the case of Nixon.

And so all that was an, you know, anti-Nixonian norms that had developed. And so we confront a problem that the United States as the oldest constitutional democracy has, which is many of these things that the world has learned from us, they have enacted into very specific laws, for example, with regard to judicial ministry in most Western democracies.

But we have not. We have this old Tudor polity where a lot of it is just norms. And if the president, as with Trump, decides he's going to break all these norms, it’s not clear what you can do.

And we're all, I think we're all looking at this and thinking, you know, yeah, what does one do? And I––frankly, I think John Roberts is looking at this and thinking, what do I do?

How do I, you know, because the president has made very clear that he intends to intimidate the Supreme Court, and we are going to have to watch and see whether the Court pushes back or not. But in some ways, we have a more informal and weaker set of constraints and checks and balances now compared to many European countries, which learned from us and in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, enacted into law as checks and balances.

Michael Feinberg: I'm having a thought that is making me want to play devil's advocate just for a second. But it's what I'm forming as I speak, so I apologize if we take a sort of circuitous route to an ultimate question. The point you raise is one that I don't think has been driven home enough in contemporary commentary on our political moment.

The overwhelming majority of how our government functions and how our society functions, as you astutely point out, is not based on written rules. It's not based on statutes. It's based on informal norms and customs. One thing that a lot of the revolutions you talk about in the book have in common is that they do overthrow regimes which are very similar to that.

You know, the Napoleonic Code, which ultimately replaces the French monarchy’s rule by fiat is one of the most detailed written systems of jurisprudence in world history. And it replaces something that was largely unwritten at all, which was the sort of French legal regime under the monarchy.

But where I want to push back is if I look at pre-World War II history, there is one example that jumps out to me of an incredibly well-written, detailed architecture of how to have a democratic republic without giving into any sort of economic animal spirits or cultural movements. And the example I'm thinking of is the Weimar Republic.

Fareed Zakaria: I thought you were going to say that. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Feinberg: So something's happening here. Is there just a way in which we need to approach the concept of revolutions from an almost fatalistic perspective? And that regardless of the regime you have, there's something that are inexorably going to occur from time to time.

Or do you think there is a middle ground between the unwritten norms of the American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution and the almost hyper-articulated architecture of something like Weimar?

Are we just not getting the balance right, or is this all inevitable?

Fareed Zakaria: Well, it's a multi-billion dollar, you know, whatever.

It's a very, it's a very big and important question.

Michael Feinberg: And it's an unfair one, 'cause I'm essentially asking you to come up with a theory of world history on the spot.

Fareed Zakaria: No no no, it’s a very fair one. Because what you're pointing out I think is the very informal American system has clearly run into trouble. But the very formal and elegantly articulated and laid out system of Weimar was overwhelmed by the Nazis.

So what's the right answer? So, my own view of Weimar has always been that it was the most advanced democratic constitution at the time in the world. And really is an amazing document when you read it. And Weimar Germany advanced human rights and individual rights far more than most people realize.

So that you know, if you were to ask yourself, will you rather be a Jew in Germany in 1931 versus a Black in America? It wasn't even close. You know, a Jew in Germany could, could be a judge or could be a foreign minister, could be a, you know, a banker. Could be a great, renowned, and repute. And that was the extraordinary advance of Weimar.

I think what Weimar tells you is that any constitution, no matter how well-designed, if it has to face the body blows of, you know, World War I, the massive humiliation of defeat in World War I, plus millions of people died.

Then, you know, the extraordinarily punitive war operations that Britain and France insisted on piling on Germany.

Then the crazy levels of hyperinflation that I think, you know, most people don't understand, we are talking about 5000% inflation. Inflation, that would mean that the price of bread would quadruple or quintuple within an hour or two. So whether you bought the bread at 8:00 AM versus you know, at 10:00 AM was, you know, a question of the bread going from costing $10 to $50. Then the Great Depression.

That is the context in which the Nazis come to power. And by the way, there's a period of enormous social change.

You do have massive migration from the East, largely of persecuted Jews who come into Germany, because Germany was ironically the most hospitable place for Jews at the time.

So you put all that together, and you've created a, you know, a time bomb that nothing could probably have contained.

So I don't regard the collapse of Weimar as a sign that the Weimar constitution was, was badly designed or written. And I think we probably need more constraints, you know, more constraints.

Let's take one example: the presidential pardon. It is clear to me that this is, we've gotten to a point of madness.

You know, you have created a royal prerogative where the president can simply, willy-nilly, pardon anybody for any reason. Does not even have to provide a reason. And Trump, you know, in a kind of almost imperial fashion, answered the question about this latest pardon by saying, ‘I didn't know who the person was. Somebody told me, pardon him. I pardoned him.’

What is a better expression of almost a kind of royal absolutism to say, ‘I'm so powerful. I don't even need to give you an answer. I don't need to give you a reason. I can even admit that I didn't even know who I was pardoning. And I just pardoned the person, right.

To me, that, like, breathtaking defiance of law suggests what we need is, you know, I mean, I would hope that––we have no way of amending the Constitution anymore, it's, you know, it's become almost impossible.

But the next president, I hope––and I will articulate this as and when the person comes into power––should create a system around this. And these would be norms, but create a pardon review process. Where a group of jurists is assembled, appointed maybe by both parties. The president, you know, if anyone can, a petition for pardon, they have to look at the case and make a recommendation.

And the president, the implication would be, we'll go by those recommendations. Right now there's nothing in law, but that's the best we can do.

But clearly we need something because we, right now, have a system that's not just rife, you know, that is geared for corruption. It is being used for corruption.

Michael Feinberg: Alright, so parts of your statements just now discomforted me immensely. And you can probably anticipate why, but I'm going to articulate them anyway.

You check off a few factors that you think led to the instability of Weimar. Mass migration of previously economically, ethnically, and politically oppressed minorities. The expansion of rights for discrete groups that previously did not have them. Economic change in a fashion that does not lift up most of the boats of the ocean.

Let's look at another factor that you didn't mention but was present in Weimar Germany, which was the tendency of industrialists to support ultraconservative figures that they thought they would be able to control and direct.

Now, let's fast forward three quarters of a century. Massive migration from South America to the United States. The expansion of, you know, civil rights protections to the gay, lesbian, transgender, intersex community. The willingness of Silicon Valley to financially back very extremist candidates under the theory that those candidates will support regulatory schemes beneficial to their industry.

I think you see where I'm going with this. How do we pull the switch on the tracks and avoid a similar fate?

Fareed Zakaria: So I think you, you lay out a very compelling set of parallels. And I don't disagree with any of them. I would just say, you know, the intensity of almost all of them was much greater in Weimar than in this case.

And the best example of that is the economics. So, you know, the United States over the last 30 years has been the country in the world––the, it puts particularly among the rich countries, that has navigated all these social changes, all these economic changes, technological changes, better than anyone else.

I mean, you know, the data is clear. The U.S. and the Eurozone economies were about the same size in 2005. Today, the U.S. economy is twice the size of the Eurozone economies. U.S. wages and Eurozone wages were around the same in the early 2000s. U.S. wages are now 50% higher. So U.S. has actually done extraordinarily well.

Yes, we have some distribution issues that are very realm and we have inequality that has been rising. But even there, by the way, in the last six or seven years, you have seen, you know, wage growth at the bottom pick up quite substantially.

So I think that we are just not in as bad a position. I think it's, you know, and don't forget the humiliation of World War I, the huge numbers of war death, the hyperinflation.

You know, inflation in the US went up to 11%. I think inflation in Germany at one point was, you know, 11000%. So it's just an order of magnitude difference.

But I do agree with the point you're making, that, that––you know, and that's sort of the point of the book. These patterns recur. And you know, every time you see the things you described, you do see a backlash.

You do see people weaponizing that backlash, and that's what you're seeing here. I just don't think it will be so successful that American democracy will disappear the way Weimar democracy did.

Michael Feinberg: Well, on that hopeful note, I think we will bring things to a close. Fareed Zakaria, thank you very much for coming on the show, and believe me when I say I sincerely hope that your notes of optimism have more [inaudible] then my sense of fatalism. I will cross my fingers that your diagnosis is correct.

Fareed Zakaria: Thank you so much. This was such a rich and fascinating conversation. I hugely enjoyed it and learned a lot from it.

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