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Fareed Zakaria GPS

The Standoff Over the Strait of Hormuz; How the Iran War Has Rattled the Gulf; Saudi Arabia Signs Defense Pact with Turkey and Pakistan. Interview With The Former Commanding General Of The U.S. Army Europe Retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges; Interview With Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute Senior Fellow Anne Applebaum. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired August 09, 2026 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:49]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria, coming to you from New York.

Today on the program, there's lots of talk about the U.S. and Iran, but often forgotten in the conversation are the Gulf nations that have been taking incoming fire on and off for more than five months. Where does this war leave them? I'll talk to two experts.

Next, the war between Russia and Ukraine has seemingly entered a new era again. The name of the new game is massive air attacks. Who has the upper hand? I'll ask retired General Ben Hodges.

Then the pictures from Ceuta have been stunning. More than 70,000 migrants rushing the border in this small Spanish enclave in North Africa many right-wing commentators have described this as an invasion and a vision of the future. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum joins me to offer her thoughts.

But first, here's "My Take."

Democrats are facing a dilemma, and Michigan's primary perfectly illustrated it, Abdul El-Sayed, the charismatic progressive, defeated Representative Haley Stevens, the establishment backed moderate. The energy was unquestionably with El-Sayed, but a "Washington Post" analysis finds his support was concentrated in the state's most educated counties and college towns. Stevens, the moderate, did better in many rural and lower income areas.

So you see, the left has the passion, but the middle still has the votes the Democrats need to win in general elections. The progressive answer is that Democrats can solve this by becoming more economically populist, attacking billionaires, expanding benefits, and thus appealing to the working class. But these ideas don't appeal to the actual working class.

Among Democrats, a Pew survey shows 41 percent of college graduates say they like politicians who call themselves Democratic socialists, compared with only 26 percent of those without degrees. Upper income Democrats are also much more favorable toward a Democratic socialist than lower income Democrats, 40 percent to 24 percent.

Democrats have spent years dreaming of a working class restoration. Joe Biden mounted the largest effort to court them with economics in decades. His administration poured hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure, factories, clean energy and semiconductors, much of it flowing to Republican counties. Yet in the next election, 2024, Donald Trump won voters without college degrees and those earning less than $50,000 while making gains among working class Hispanic and black voters.

You see, over the last 30 years, the Democrats have moved left on economics consistently. Obama was to the left of Clinton, and Biden was to the left of Obama. And in that same period, the working class has steadily abandoned the party.

The lesson is not that economics don't matter, but the Democratic Party's problem is not that it is seen as too centrist on economics. Democrats routinely lead Republicans on issues like health care, and even now, the cost of living. Their liabilities are cultural and social issues. Crime, immigration, the border, and the so-called woke agenda. One example, according to Pew, 43 percent of voters agree with Republicans on crime policy, while only 29 percent agree with Democrats.

When Democrats come under pressure, they find it much easier to move left on economics than toward the center on culture.

[10:05:05]

If they could speak plainly and say that the border must be controlled, repeat offenders punished, standards of merit defended, or that biological sex matters, they risk revolts from activists, advocacy groups, and highly educated staffers. So instead, Democrats offer a larger subsidy, a new benefit or a fiercer attack on billionaires while leaving untouched the cultural attitudes that are actually alienating many voters.

The evidence suggests that this strategy is backwards. One study tested Democratic shifts across 29 policy issues and found that the largest electoral gains tended to come from moving toward the middle on social and cultural questions. Another report found that working class voters placed far more emphasis than liberal college graduates on securing the border, reducing crime and adding police.

Liberal college graduates placed far more emphasis on resisting authoritarianism, protecting trans rights, climate change and abortion. The divide widened not because working class voters simply lurched to the right, but rather that college educated Democrats moved left further and faster.

In 2000, according to an analysis by American politics scholar Nicholas Jacobs, only about 8 percent of both Democrats and working class voters favored increasing immigration. By 2020, 48 percent of Democrats did, compared with 24 percent of working class voters. A three-point gap over abortion in 1980 became a 30-point gap by 2024. Large gaps also opened up over religion, family and trust in government not to waste taxpayer dollars.

Trump understands the political force of this estrangement. Listen to what he rails against in his campaign rallies. Transgender athletes, DEI bureaucracies, elite universities, crime and an out-of-control border.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There's never been a border in the world like this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: He knows that these issues hit voters in their gut. The answer is not for Democrats to imitate Trump, abandon minorities, or become reactionary. It is to stop imagining that Medicare for All and wealth taxes will restore the New Deal coalition. That world and that coalition are gone.

The good news is that the party already has a formidable modern coalition -- college educated voters, women, minorities, younger Americans, and many working and middle class voters in metropolitan America. These voters want not a socialist revolution, but effective liberal government that delivers affordable housing, good schools, accessible health care, safe streets, a controlled border, legal immigration and economic growth. And perhaps this will help Democrats to make inroads with the rest of the working class again, too.

Democrats just need to show culturally moderate voters that liberalism can distinguish compassion from permissiveness, openness from disorder, and equality from ideological conformity. Michigan showed where the party's energy lies for its base. The fraction of Americans who vote in primaries. The test is whether Democrats can turn that energy into a politics of common sense that appeals to the rest of the country.

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.

The Gulf States are reeling. Iran not content to hit just U.S. military bases in the region has targeted Gulf hotels, airports and energy infrastructure, and it says it will further escalate if Gulf leaders cannot rein in Donald Trump. The region's economic lifeline, its oil and gas exports, are squeezed in the east via Iran's control over the Strait of Hormuz, and in the west, as Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen are striking Saudi tankers in the Red Sea.

How do Gulf countries move forward?

Joining me to discuss all this is Tarek Masoud, the director of Harvard's Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, and Danny Citrinowicz, who served as the head of the Iran branch of Israel's military intelligence. He's now a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv based Institute for National Security Studies. Danny, let me begin with you. The impasse -- before we get to the

Gulf, the impasse right now seems to be basically that Iran is insisting that no matter what the -- you know, what the nature of the deal is they have to have a kind of privileged control over the Strait of Hormuz. They may or may not charge. But that is their discretion. The American position is no, it has to be complete, open, free, unimpeded access. Who is going to give in here?

DANNY CITRINOWICZ, SENIOR RESEARCHER, INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES: Fareed, thank you for inviting me. And yes, like you said, there is an impasse. But eventually, I don't think that the Iranians will forego their control over the Hormuz Straits, even if the U.S. will escalate. So the ball is in the administration court and mainly in Trump's. President Trump's decision making process, saying that eventually he can escalate, but no one is securing the fact that Iran will capitulate or he can eventually allow Iran some sort of control over the straits.

Definitely Iran is allowing to control at least the entrance to the straits. And this is something that Iran is aspiring to. And I think that Washington will have to decide whether to accept it and open the maritime blockade or actually continuing pressuring Iran, knowing that Iran will retaliate. So I think in the end of the day, it's a simple choice between accepting Iranian control over the straits or escalating into a war that nobody knows how it will end. But definitely it won't bend to the Iranian capitulation.

ZAKARIA: Tarek, so when you look at the situation in the Gulf, you grew up in Saudi Arabia. You know it well. You've studied it all your life. They had a kind of model which was the UAE, Qatar, increasingly the Saudis, which is sort of welcome to Dubai. You know, you're in Switzerland, you're safe, you're secure. You can do all the business you want. How much does has this war sort of rattled that whole idea?

TAREK MASOUD, PROFESSOR OF DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNANCE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Look, I think it's rattled it significantly. If you think about the United Arab Emirates, this was a country that, you know, when I was living in Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s, nobody would have predicted that this would become sort of the, you know, emblem of openness and modernity that it has become. And, you know, I like to say that the UAE was close to achieving escape velocity from the Middle East.

It was a country that many people forgot was located in this pretty troubled region. It's a place that people thought was secure. Expats were making their lives there. And then then this war reminded everybody that this region is, as one Saudi commentator recently noted, a jungle. It's a difficult place. And here's the problem. For a long time in all of these countries, there's always been a camp of foreign policy thinkers that I would call like the American camp, the camp that believes that their future lies in closer ties with the U.S. and they would always make the argument that this is a difficult region.

By bringing the U.S. in, it makes it less difficult. It makes it less of a jungle. Well, this recent war, the U.S. has basically been an agent, not of order but of chaos. And so the Gulf countries find themselves really torn between two irrational actors. Right? So on the one hand, you have this irrational enemy, but on the other hand, you have an ally that also doesn't look totally rational that on the one day says they're going to obliterate Iran, the next day says, oh, well, maybe we'll share control of the Strait of Hormuz, between Donald Trump and the mullahs.

And so consequently, they are deciding that they need to make other arrangements to plan for a future in which the U.S. isn't actually going to offer them security guarantees. The Gulf countries have different views about how to go about this, but all of them are looking to a postwar order in which they're going to have to do a lot more for themselves.

ZAKARIA: A post-American Gulf order.

MASOUD: Yes. Post-American world. Yes.

ZAKARIA: All right, stay with us. When we come back, I'm going to ask, to flesh out exactly what the divisions are between, say, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. When we get back.

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[10:18:32]

ZAKARIA: The U.S. has long been the primary security guarantor for the Gulf nations. Now faced with American unreliability and a war with Iran, Gulf nations are looking for other ways to protect themselves. On Friday in Mecca, Saudi Arabia signed a NATO style mutual defense pact with Pakistan and Turkey.

I'm back with Tarek Masoud and Danny Citrinowicz.

Danny, what did you make of this pact? And it does feel like you're now seeing a very clear division. The UAE is backing a kind of Israel- American hard line against Iran. And the Saudis seem to be trying to make, you know, have at least good talks with Iran and at the same time banding with countries like Turkey, Pakistan and even Qatar, who their once enemy for this more balanced approach where they're saying we're talking to all sides.

CITRINOWICZ: Well, definitely. And I think this war against Iran exposed the simple fact that there is no GCC. There are Gulf countries, but they are not united. One hand, you had the Omanis and the Qataris and a little bit of the Saudis want to interact with the Iranians, understanding that you cannot push Iran into the corner. On the other side, you have UAE and Bahrain that are definitely being supported by Israel and interested in expanding the -- at least the pressure on Iran.

And I think it's also returning back to the personal enmity between MBS and MBC and the bad relations between UAE and Saudi Arabia in general. It's actually highlighted another element that countries are not actually relying on the U.S. support.

[10:20:04]

I think the Saudis are quite disappointed, and I think they're feeling exposed to the Iranian and Houthis threat. So they need other elements like the Pakistani, like the Turks, that to help them. So I think these developments are interesting. It's more or less like the day after the Gulf and the diversification of the security needs for those countries. But at the end of the day, I think that it's all about what will happen if Iran and the Houthis will attack Saudi tomorrow.

Whether this alliance actually attack in Yemen and Iran, and I have serious doubts about it, but definitely it's a very interesting development that they need to be really considered. And looking at how this actually will evolve into the future.

ZAKARIA: Tarek, what do you think about this schism between Saudis and the UAE? And does it speak to a broader issue?

MASOUD: Look, I mean, you know, it's interesting. Danny I think is right when he says that the current war reveals that there isn't such a thing as a kind of unified Gulf Cooperation Council position. But I think of this schism, at least with respect to the current wars, being driven less by ideological differences, although there are some and more by sort of how the U.S. has conducted this war. I think of the Saudis as --

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: The problem is American unreliability.

MASOUD: Yes. I think the Saudis are the swing voters, right? The Emiratis and the Bahrainis are very committed. And on the part -- and both of them have strong ideological and geopolitical reasons for being committed to going all out against Iran. And then, of course, you know, the Qataris and the Omanis have a fairly different position. The Saudis and the Kuwaitis, to a lesser extent, I think of as the swing voters.

If -- remember, MBS partially created this situation. Remember, this is the guy who told us that Khamenei, the former supreme leader, was the equivalent of Hitler. If the United States had been willing to go in and go in hard and commit troops and basically fulfill the most expansive version of the dream to hit Iran, I think the Saudis would have fallen in line. The fact that the U.S. hasn't done that has caused the Saudis to think, OK, we need a-- we need to deescalate.

We need to lean into what we did in 2023, when we came to detente with Iran. So I think that's a big driver of what is happening.

ZAKARIA: So the Saudis sort of view is either you should have gone in big and destroyed the regime completely, or you should make some accommodation with it.

MASOUD: That's my read. Yes. In other words, this is definitely the second best option for them right now. But if the U.S. had been willing to go in big, I think the Saudis would have been there. ZAKARIA: Danny, what happens to the Gulf in a situation where Iran

and, let's say Oman have joint control of the of the Gulf, they may or may not charge for it, but they are clearly seen as the gatekeepers to the Strait of Hormuz. Can the Gulf States live with that?

CITRINOWICZ: Oh, definitely yes. It's not that they like it, but I think that for them stability is above everything, even above winning against Iran. I think that instability right now causing a major problem for them, especially on the economical side. And I think they need to return back stability, even if the Iranians will have some sort of control over the Hormuz Straits for a temporary time.

I think that for them, again, it's not the best solution, but maybe it's the only solution that we have right now just to return back stability and even more importantly to prevent an escalation that actually put them in a real risk, given the Iranian threat they're going to attack the energy facilities in those countries. So I think that they don't want to live with that, but they don't have any other choice just to live with that.

ZAKARIA: Final thought. Saudi normalization with Israel way on the back burner right now.

MASOUD: Well, you know, President Trump, you saw that in the deal that the United States made with the Saudis to help them with their civilian nuclear program. After the deal was basically done, President Trump came and said there are two other conditions. No domestic enrichment and you have to join the Abraham Accords. And it's interesting that the Saudis basically didn't respond to those new conditions at all. They pretended as if the president hadn't said them. The Saudis have been very clear --

ZAKARIA: And a pro-regime commentator said in an article, if you don't give us the enrichment, we will go to the Chinese.

MASOUD: Yes, that's right. I think the Saudis have been very clear they are open to normalization if the state of Israel is willing to offer a clear set of irrevocable steps to a Palestinian state. We're nowhere near there. And, you know, the fact that the Saudis are now allying much more with Turkey, which is a country that if you, I mean, what Danny has forgotten about Israel, I haven't learned yet, but so he may disagree.

But if you look at Israeli discourse right now, they talk about Turkey as the new enemy. And so here's Saudi Arabia getting further enmeshed with the Turks can't be read in Israel as something conducive to normalization between Saudi and Israel.

[10:25:04]

ZAKARIA: I saw Danny shake -- nodding his head in agreement. So on that note of agreement, we're going to have to leave it.

Danny, Tarek, thank you. So, so smart.

Next on GPS, the war in Ukraine has increasingly become a war above Ukraine and above Russia. We'll take a look at the ever more ferocious air war between the two. Who is winning? We'll tell you when we come back.

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ZAKARIA: Russia's war in Ukraine is being fought more and more in the skies above each nation. Russia bombarded Kyiv this week with ballistic missiles in a ferocious attack made more severe by the fact that Ukraine's depleted air defenses did not intercept any of Moscow's missiles. It's not just Russia that has escalated its attacks, far from it. Ukraine has recently successfully targeted major Russian oil facilities, warehouses and military and energy infrastructure deep inside Russian territory.

Joining me now to discuss is the former Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe, Ben Hodges. Ben, welcome. You've been so smart and prescient on all this. Give me, first, a sense of bottom line, what is the state of the war right now? I don't want to make it something as simple as who is winning, but what does it look like to you?

LT. GEN. BEN HODGES (RET.), FORMER COMMANDING GENERAL, U.S. ARMY EUROPE: Well, Fareed, it's clear that the Russians can no longer conquer territory. The Ukrainians have figured out how to stop Russia's ground offensives. Russia's Navy is no longer a factor in the Black Sea. But the one thing the Ukrainians have not been able to stop is Russia's relentless missile attacks against Ukrainian cities.

There's just -- they don't have enough of the air and missile defense capabilities. And Russia has decided to try and put pressure on Ukraine by just attacking cities and destroying the power grid.

On the other hand, Ukrainians have developed capabilities, mid-range drones and missiles that have enabled them to wreck Russia's logistics, particularly down in the area around Crimea. And most importantly, they've developed long range capabilities that enable them to severely damage Russia's oil and gas export industry. And by doing that, I think this will make it very difficult for Russia to sustain the war going forward.

ZAKARIA: So, Ukraine has this big problem. It has very few air defenses. And it is -- you know, it needs many more. President Zelenskyy has been pleading with the United States to provide some. President Trump made a rather odd announcement that they were going to license production of them.

Can you give us a sense of what that means, and when would the Ukrainians get these air defenses if they're beginning to license production now?

HODGES: Well, I think that -- unfortunately, it's very unlikely that the president ever intended to allow this to happen. I think industry was caught by surprise by this announcement at the Ankara Summit. And I just don't see the movement happening that would allow this.

Now, there may be some work done to allow Ukraine to produce some sort of ballistic missile capabilities, something a little bit less, perhaps, than the Patriot interceptors that we're accustomed to using ourselves. But hopefully the United States will get behind enabling some production, probably in another country outside of Ukraine.

There's understandable concerns about technology transfers. But this really, Fareed, is about, you know, our national interest. What is America's strategic interest? And the president, I think, should make it clear to the American people and the Congress that it is in our interests that Ukraine is able to defeat Russia. And therefore, we should give them what they need, including air and missile defense.

ZAKARIA: Isn't it fair to say, though, Ben, that the biggest problem Ukraine has been facing, it's sort of underreported, I think, in the last year has been the basically, the collapse of American support, American military support, intelligence support, air defense support. That is the biggest new factor in the war.

HODGES: Well, you're right. And I remember the vice president said back a couple of months ago that one of his proudest accomplishments was stopping American aid for Ukraine. I don't know how anybody could see that as an accomplishment. And of course, the fact that army or intelligence or any other sort of support for Ukraine dropping is based on the direction from the -- from the White House, from the administration.

ZAKARIA: And it's fair to say that Ukraine has made some striking progress. As you say, they've been striking deep into Russian territory. They've hit a lot of the oil refineries. Russia has not been able to sell a lot more oil, despite the waiver of sanctions because of the Iran war. They're not in good shape.

HODGES: No, this is an important point. You know, Russia's strength throughout the centuries has always been its vastness, that it was big enough to be able to absorb invading armies and then ultimately eject them. Now, this vastness is a vulnerability because Russia does not have the air defense capabilities to protect all of its widely scattered refineries and oil and gas export facilities.

[10:35:10]

And Ukraine has developed the capability to reach with precision, using missiles or drones that can carry a large enough warhead to cause real damage against a refinery that might be 2,000 kilometers away. That's well over a thousand miles.

So Ukraine's ability to develop those kinds of weapons and Russia's inability to stop that I think this, frankly, is Ukraine's possible path to victory if they can continue doing that. And it's clear that Russia's attacks on Ukrainian cities, which are terrible and violate all the wars of -- all the laws of armed conflict, those are not going to achieve decisive effect. It only makes Ukrainians more determined.

ZAKARIA: Ben Hodges, thank you. Thank you for helping shed some light on all this.

HODGES: Thank you for the opportunity, Fareed. ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, last week, more than 70,000 migrants arrived from Morocco onto the shores of the neighboring Spanish territory of Ceuta. It appeared to be a coordinated event. So, who was behind it? We'll tell you when we come back.

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[10:40:59]

ZAKARIA: The images out of the Spanish City of Ceuta last week swiftly circulated the globe as over 70,000 migrants from Morocco arrived on the shores of the Spanish territory in North Africa, more than 70 people died. Far-right figures from Vice President JD Vance to Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage were quick to jump on the story and kick up a panic over immigration, but the crisis was over almost as soon as it began. Within a day, the majority of the migrants had returned to Morocco.

Joining me now is Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for "The Atlantic." Anne, tell us what was your sort of lesson from this? Because it did look -- the pictures were compelling. It kind of looked like an invasion.

ANNE APPLEBAUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: It looked like an invasion. And it may have been designed to look like an invasion. We know that there was a social media campaign that encouraged people to come, including giving them instructions on how to swim there, what kinds of flippers and goggles to buy, and also giving them false information that once they reach Ceuta, which is the Spanish enclave in North Africa, that they would have automatic access to Spain and therefore the European Union. None of that was true.

And the people who posted the photographs with pictures of people climbing walls and landing on the beach and so on, also knew that it wasn't true. Even Ceuta doesn't have immediate access to Spain. It's not immediately part of Schengen. You have to show papers at the border. There was never any chance that these 70,000 people who'd been lied to were going to get to Europe.

Nevertheless, it was -- it was in that two cents is an orchestrated crisis. It was created by someone, we don't know who, in order to persuade people to come. And then it was the photographs and pictures were sent around the world by people who also had the duty to know that the crisis would soon be over. And it wasn't what they were saying it was.

ZAKARIA: What is the speculation about, you know, how did it happen? Because Morocco is a very -- I mean, it's a very tightly controlled country. You know, some people call it a police state. Whatever it is, it seems difficult to imagine that this could have just happened by chance.

APPLEBAUM: So, it's clear that the Moroccan police weren't stopping people. At some point, they may have tried at one point or another, but they weren't stopping everybody. Maybe that they didn't want to shoot people. And I think the Spanish police had the same dilemma. It doesn't seem, though, that it was in the interests of the Moroccan government to create this mass exodus. I mean, maybe they were seeking to terrorize Spain or threaten Spain's sovereignty over this enclave. But there are others who have an interest in undermining Spain as well.

The Spanish themselves have spun, I mean, I don't want to repeat all the conspiracy theories, but they wonder whether the closeness of the American president to the king of Morocco might have had something to do with it. Maybe the Moroccans felt they had backing from the U.S., maybe Donald Trump's -- the frustration with Spain because Spain hadn't been part of the -- wasn't allowing U.S. to use its bases in the war in Iraq was part of it, too.

It's clear that somebody, though, wanted to weaken Spain, wanted to deceive people. And as I said, that's actually the real story. Why did that happen? I can -- I can offer you guesses, but we don't know yet for certain.

ZAKARIA: Give me your guesses.

APPLEBAUM: So the guesses are somebody in Morocco, either for political reasons or for economic reasons. Maybe some part of the international far-right who wanted to demonstrate that Spain was weak or show that Spain was weak, or undermine the European Union. There are a lot of actors who could have wanted to do that.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that part of it is that the border issue is becoming less important in Europe, as in America, as borders do get tightened? I'm wondering, you know, because so much of the rise of right-wing populism in Europe has been fueled by this one issue, immigration.

[10:45:07]

Is it sort of on the ground, actually, losing its salience? Or what's going on?

APPLEBAUM: So, it's true that tightening of borders has been a feature of every country. And this is because of these kinds of events which -- actually, this isn't the first time a rush onto a border has been orchestrated. The Moroccans did it once before.

Several years ago, there was an incident where Belarus (ph) was importing people from the Middle East and bringing them to the Polish border. And because of all of those incidents, a lot of countries have changed their rules about how you can ask for asylum. And as you say, the numbers of people coming into Europe irregularly or illegally have gone way down.

That doesn't mean that the issue is disappearing. People are seeking to find ways to continue pointing to chaos of the kind that we saw last week, using photographs to demonstrate, you know, the negative impact of immigration because this has been one of the things that's driven the popularity of those political parties.

ZAKARIA: All right. We'll have to leave it at that. Anne Applebaum, always a pleasure.

APPLEBAUM: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, we know that many of America's leaders are, well, pretty old. But do they also run the country largely based on the interests of the old? We'll explore that next.

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[10:50:55]

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. Senator Mitch McConnell has been absent eight weeks and counting from Senate proceedings. His office says he's recovering from a fall. But public speculation rages on about his declining health.

McConnell, at 84, isn't the first member of the upper House to serve into old age. Dianne Feinstein served until her death in 2023 at 90 even as she grew increasingly frail.

The median age is now 66 in the Senate and 58 in the House. Although median age for Americans is still under 40, our president is 80. The average age of a sitting federal judge was nearly 68 in 2024. There is even one serving at 102.

Aging politicians may just be the most visible feature of government for and by the elderly. That is what the scholar Samuel Moyn argues in his new book, "Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth and What to Do About It."

America is in a golden age for being of golden age. The average net worth of 65 to 70 year olds was 1.8 million in 2022, up 178 percent from 1989. People 70 and older had 19 percent of the country's total household wealth in 1989. Now they have 32 percent. That's why the share of wealth for those under 40 has almost halved from 12 percent to 6.6 percent. It wasn't always this way.

After the Great Depression, poverty was widespread, particularly for the elderly. That's what prompted Franklin Delano Roosevelt to sign into law the 1935 Social Security Act, which for the first time established regular payments for the elderly financed by payroll taxes.

The goal, FDR said, was to give some measure of protection against poverty-ridden old age. That effort turned out to be a tremendous success. The elder poverty rate dropped from 35 percent in 1959 to less than 10 percent in 1999. Until the 1970s, the poverty rate among those 65 and older used to trend higher than other age groups. Now, it is consistently lower.

But America has overlearned its lesson. Federal spending is weighted overwhelmingly towards seniors today. For every $6.00 the U.S. government spends on those 65 and over, it spends just $1.00 on children and young adults.

The United States, the richest country in the world, spends among the least in the OECD on family benefits. And child poverty is consistently higher than elderly poverty. In 2024, it was 14.3 percent. Elder poverty was just under 10 percent. As "The Wall Street Journal" notes, it's almost as though the U.S. is stuck on a loop, continuing to lavish the elderly with benefits even though the pain in the economy has moved elsewhere.

The problem is not just with federal benefits. States also shower the elderly with tax breaks on housing, on income, including Social Security and on pensions. And many of these benefits accrue to the wealthy. The NYU professor and podcaster Scott Galloway says America is waging a war on the young.

Minimum wage, which he used as a proxy for how we value youth labor, has not kept pace with inflation. Housing and stock prices have soared, making it even harder for young people to buy homes or enter the stock market, the main engine of wealth creation in America.

This is a story we already know about rising inequality in America. The solutions are partly redistributive. Galloway suggests taxing capital gains as income and streamlining permits so more housing could be built, which would drive down housing prices.

[10:55:00]

He also believes we should reform Social Security. It's easy to say there's no political will to do any of this, but there may be a solution to that problem, too. Moyn notes in his book that part of the reason we're stuck with aging politicians who serve an aging electorate at the expense of the young is that older people are the ones who vote, and children under 18, of course, have no vote.

The median age of the general election voter is 52. Outside the presidential election, it is 55. But in primaries which determine 90 percent of the seats in the current House, the median voter is 65 years old.

Instead of pressuring politicians to act in defiance of their voters, we could adopt policies to encourage the young who can to vote like mandatory voting or a national holiday on voting day, both of which are law in many countries. In a democracy, after all, the surest way to change policies is to throw the old bums out.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week, and I will see you next week.

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