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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Lessons from America's Post-9/11 Wars; The Megatrends Defining 2026. Populists' Argument Against Liberal Democracy; How Canada's Liberals Have Thrived In A Populist Age. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired September 06, 2026 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:41]

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.

Today on the program, we'll look at the legacy of 9/11 and the wars that followed, as the world prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of that tragic day. Peter Bergen has written an important book on the subject, and he will join me.

Then, the transformative effects of GLP-1, the worrying amount of time people are spending alone, and the thought that A.I. will not take away all of our jobs.

Those are some of the big trends of 2026 that the writer Derek Thompson is watching. He will explain.

And I explore the worrying state of democracy around the world with some great thinkers on the subject, Francis Fukuyama, Chrystia Freeland and David French.

Twenty-five years ago, on a crisp September morning, the brilliant blue skies were shattered by inconceivable acts of terror. The 9/11 attacks launched America into a war that would span four presidents and expand from Afghanistan to Iraq and to ISIS. The war on terror produced some remarkable tactical successes, but at enormous human and financial cost, and it has fundamentally changed the way America exercises military power.

Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst, examines that history in his new book, "All the Presidents' Wars." He joins me now.

Peter, always a pleasure to have you on. This book really is a kind of an account. It brings it all together of these various actions that all fall under the idea of a kind of global response to the 9/11 attacks and to the rise of a kind of radical militant Islam.

What do you think, like what is the theme that to you emerges out of it?

PETER BERGEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: The one big theme, Fareed -- thank you for having me on -- is, you know, we never or very rarely seem to plan for the day after the conflict. And we're very good at breaking things and killing people. But, you know, the big theme is we can win every tactical operational engagement, but often it's not attached to a real strategy. And when we look at Iran, of course, that is the case right now. But, you know, Trump --

ZAKARIA: So stop for a minute. What you were just saying is you can win the military part of it, but you often lose in the politics, the diplomacy, and so the victory is never enduring. It never kind of translates into success politically on the ground.

BERGEN: Exactly. And if you, you know, think about a checklist, you would have to go to war, you'd have congressional authorization, you'd have NATO allies, you'd have a U.N. resolution, you'd have a real imminent threat. You'd have a plan for the day after hostilities. You'd have a strategy. And none of those things have been ticked in this case, in the Iran war. And so every mistake that we've made in the past, we -- barring sending in large numbers of ground troops, we're replicating. It's like we don't learn from our own history. It's very sad.

ZAKARIA: There's another piece of it, and this comes through in the book which is that there is a kind of shift in the world of Islam, particularly of Middle Eastern, of Arab Islam, of Sunni Islam. There was a lot of militancy, fundamentalism, you know, kind of celebration of violence against foreigners, against the West. A lot of it funded, let's be honest, by Saudi Arabia and a few other countries.

There has been a huge shift there. The Saudi crown prince is actually now actively pushing the opposite message -- tolerance. He has defanged the religious authorities in Saudi Arabia. He has stopped the export of all that kind of fundamentalism.

BERGEN: Yes. I mean, there's an estimate of about $100 billion of Saudi spent exporting their, you know, fairly extreme version of Islam around the world. And so that stopped.

[10:05:02]

You know, MBS, the leader of Saudi Arabia, you know, he's also imposed a rather dictatorial regime domestically. So I totally agree with you. On the other hand, you know, there is no dissident movement or of any kind, right, in Saudi Arabia. So it's come at sort of a cost, but I --

ZAKARIA: It's not like there were a lot of dissidents in Saudi Arabia.

BERGEN: Well, no, there were --

(CROSSTALK)

BERGEN: There was -- you know, it was -- you know, before it was a consensus based absolute monarchy. Now it's a kind of Stalinist dictatorship minus the gulags, you know, but also liberal and when it comes to religion, right? I mean, that's kind of the way I see it.

ZAKARIA: It seems to me that what has become clear is the aspirations of ordinary Muslims in that part of the world is more to be Dubai than to be Afghanistan.

BERGEN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: And it's -- you know, he's playing to that. But also there feels like there is less of that kind of intellectual support for jihadism. Do you think that we're at the end of this chapter?

BERGEN: I don't, because when you look at previous waves of terrorism, they either succeeded like the anti-colonial wave or the Marxist wave kind of collapsed with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is the religious wave. And you can't abolish God. You know? You know, and so, you know, we began in '79 with all the events that we know happened in that year. I don't think it is ever going to go away. It can be managed.

ZAKARIA: Right.

BERGEN: But it can't be abolished.

ZAKARIA: The part I worry about is the ratchet of the bigger and bigger state, the decline of civil liberties, the search function of government going up. And you have these numbers. The post-9/11 wars basically cost $6 trillion.

BERGEN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: If you add it all up, and you know, $2 trillion of current and projected veterans care, but the -- you know, so much of the rest of it was just the expansion of the Pentagon, all that stuff. It feels like it would be worth -- 25 years is a good marker to say, look back, what did we do right, what did we do wrong. And are there things that can be dialed back? But that seems to never happen in government.

BERGEN: We got some things right. A lot of things we did in Afghanistan, I think, succeeded. The fight against ISIS succeeded with very limited American troops on the ground, allying with local Iraqi and Syrian forces. And that was both an Obama plan and a Trump plan. So I call it go light, go long where you -- it's politically sustainable here.

ZAKARIA: Go light, go long. Don't try to occupy. Don't try to rule.

BERGEN: Right.

ZAKARIA: Seems to me to be the lesson.

BERGEN: Yes. Advise and assist. And the Americans are in the back and, you know, the people liberating the territory are Iraqis and Syrians. They're not Americans on Humvees. Eventually, after trial and error, we got to this policy, I think, with ISIS, which actually succeeded.

Now, it came also at a cost because we had 35,000 American airstrikes. Mosul, second largest city in Iraq, turned into a parking lot. You know, it wasn't perfect. And, you know, a lot of people died on the Iraqi and Syrian sides. But the point is, from an American perspective, I do think the fight against ISIS provides something of a model for how to go about things so you don't have to -- that is politically and financially sustainable here.

ZAKARIA: So maybe that is the, you know, the kind of the one important lesson that came out of this?

BERGEN: Yes, I think so. I mean, we'll see if it -- you know.

ZAKARIA: Is it being followed in Iran?

BERGEN: Well, I mean, I just, you know, it's -- you know, Iran is a puzzle wrapped inside a -- yes. Another puzzle. I don't --

(LAUGHTER)

ZAKARIA: That will take another interview.

BERGEN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Peter Bergen, always a pleasure to have you on.

BERGEN: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll speak with the author Derek Thompson to get his take on the trends defining the news cycle in 2026. In some cases, he is more hopeful than you might think.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:13:02]

ZAKARIA: When you look at the trends that seem to define modern life, it can be quite depressing. There's economic anxiety, social isolation, global wars, political polarization. But my next guest has done a deep dive into the data and come away with a different and more hopeful conclusion.

In a piece published on his Substack, the author and podcast host Derek Thompson examined six of the megatrends that he sees defining the news cycle in 2026. Here is our conversation.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Derek Thompson, welcome as always.

DEREK THOMPSON, AUTHOR ON SUBSTACK: Great to be here. Thank you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: So when you looked at the megatrends, the first one you talked about is one that a lot of people have been talking about, which is the increasing level of sort of loneliness that people seem to feel. And what is striking is you have -- it's not just a feeling. There's a lot of data to back it up.

THOMPSON: Yes. And maybe I would like to begin by making a piece of vocabulary distinction. It's not just loneliness, it's aloneness. It's the fact that Americans today, by the official statistics, spend more time alone than any period in recorded history. This is true for every age group. It's true for rich and poor. It's true for educated and non-educated. But it is most true for young people.

Young people spend much more time alone. They spend significantly less time socializing with others. They tell pollsters they have fewer friends. They tell pollsters they go out with their friends less. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, American time use survey has a clever way of asking young people how much time they spend partying, that is, attending social events and networking events and ceremonies.

Fareed, partying among Americans under 25 has declined by about 70 percent this century.

[10:15:05]

It is unbelievable how dramatic this inward turning of American life has been since the age of the smartphone. I don't want to say that this is all about smartphones. You know, Robert Putnam published "Bowling Alone" in the year 2000, and he was writing about how the television and the automobile was already pulling American life inward. But I think when you add all of these technologies together, the suburbs and the car. television and couches, comfortable homes, smartphones, infinite entertainment on our phones, it has collectively pulled us away from other people and towards screens.

And I think it's having a berserk effect on American society. I do think it is making us sadder. I think in many cases it is making us lonelier, and it is pulling us out of the real world such that when we experience or when we think about things like politics, we don't think about the politics of our street or our community. We experience politics through our phones, and that has a way of nationalizing politics, globalizing politics, making it significantly more of an in- group versus outgroup conflict, which tends to do very well in social media.

And so I'm interested not only in the fact that, yes, we are more alone, we are spending more time alone, but also the second and third order consequences of the fact that we are not in the world, we're not plunged into the world as much as we used to be.

ZAKARIA: Fascinating. I give one statistic that you point to, which I think is so interesting, given that everyone is talking about declining fertility rates in the United States and much of the world. In the 1980s, teenagers were asked, do you ever go on dates? 87 percent say yes. Today that number is 46 percent.

Your second trend is a more hopeful trend, which is the do-it-all drug. What is that?

THOMPSON: I think the GLP-1 revolution, we're talking about drugs like Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Eli Lilly's suite of drugs. This GLP-1 revolution does so much more than treat type two diabetes. It does so much more than cause weight loss. This seems to be a whole body drug. It seems to reduce inflammation. It reduces arthritis. It seems to make people more healthy from a cardiovascular level and reduce rates of heart disease. And it's even being investigated for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, although I think the jury is still out there. I mean, just very recently, Eli Lilly came out with its third

generation GLP-1 drug. So we had Semaglutide, which is better known as Ozempic. We had Tirzepatide. And now there's a new category called Retatrutide, which tries to focus on not just one hormone, but three different hormones. It causes significantly more weight loss, and it very likely is significantly better at reducing things like inflammation and the risk of heart attack.

I think it is very possible, Fareed, that despite the fact that, of course, we want to be careful about the possible side effects of new drugs, we are looking now at with Retatrutide and what may be the most popular and most profitable drug ever sold in American history. And it's going to be very important and I think very interesting to look at the way that it changes all sorts of things about American life, like the same way that the antisocial century is one phenomenon that has this ripple effect.

The fact that GLP-1s are being taken more is reducing alcohol intake. It's moving eating from snack food toward other healthier food. And so companies like PepsiCo or Bacardi are going to have to react to this extraordinary change that a single drug category is going to have in American life.

ZAKARIA: Trend number three is A.I. apocalypse nope. We have talked about this before, but explain very quickly why you think the fact that A.I. is going to be used for all kinds of things doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have the jobs go away.

THOMPSON: Sure. I call this trend apocalypse nope because I spent most of 2025 quite worried that artificial intelligence was a bubble. And most of 2026, looking at the fact that Anthropic and the larger A.I. industry is seeing revenue growth, that is basically unlike anything we've seen in modern -- in the modern history of corporate accounting.

And so as revenue growth is accelerating, I'm less worried about the fact that A.I. is a bubble. But it pulls in other worries like if A.I. is being used at this scale, at what point should we fear that it's going to steal our jobs? I want to give people one sort of framework for hope. There's an idea in labor economics called the O-ring job and O-ring borrows its name from the part of the challenger, the tiny O- ring that was responsible for the explosion of the Challenger space rocket. Well, lots of jobs these economists say similarly have an O- ring.

[10:20:01]

So imagine, for example, if someone's job is five tasks and A.I. is very, very good at automating four of those tasks. But it can't automate one of those five tasks. That still remains in the realm of humans being better than A.I. Well, maybe A.I. doesn't automate that job at all because of this O-ring exception. Maybe what it does is make the job much more productive. Therefore, higher paid, and it stays in the domain of for humans only because humans are the best at doing that proverbial O-ring.

Well, that's a world where artificial intelligence does not wipe out jobs. It's more like a world where artificial intelligence makes a lot of these jobs more productive and therefore higher paid. And so I'm not making any particular prediction here, but I want people to keep top of mind the possibility that while artificial intelligence might -- might automate some entire job categories, it's absolutely possible that it will do just what the internet or digital spreadsheets or automobiles did to the U.S. economy, which is make the overall economy richer and make certain jobs much more highly paying.

ZAKARIA: And the spreadsheet example is sort of, to put it very quickly, you had, you know, the spreadsheet was invented. People thought we won't need accountants. In fact, we ended up with more accountants because suddenly it becomes very easy to use spreadsheets to analyze everything. Right?

THOMPSON: It's not just that we ended up with more accountants. We ended up with jobs that didn't exist in the 1970s that are based on work in spreadsheets. So in the same way, you could, by analogy, imagine a world in which, you know, A.I. Claude., ChatGPT, doesn't bring unemployment to like 20 percent. It rather becomes the kind of home screen for a new kind of white-collar worker who is working with this A.I. technology with the same frequency that they're working with, say, Microsoft Office, Excel and PowerPoint.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I'll ask Derek about two more of the trends he examined -- global violence and A.I., its effect on media specifically, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:26:33]

ZAKARIA: And I'm back with Derek Thompson, host of the podcast "Plain English," and author on Substack, to talk more about the megatrends that he sees defining our current moment.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: I want to move to another one of your trends, which is the paradox of global violence. And the data here is pretty remarkable. Explain it.

THOMPSON: Fareed, the media is very good at reporting stories that are sudden and negative. The media is much worse at reporting stories that are slow-moving and positive, and for that reason, I think a lot of news shows have missed one of the most important stories in America, which is that in the early 2020s, especially coming out of the pandemic, there was an enormous crime wave.

Murders went berserk in New York, in New Orleans, Washington, D.C. but something really remarkable has happened in the last few years that's gotten very little attention. Murders have not just fallen to the 2010 lows, murders, the homicide rate, has fallen to all-time lows in some of the biggest cities in this country. In fact, if you compare where the homicide rate is now compared to where it was at its 20th century peak in most of these cities, we're talking about a decline between 80 percent and 90 percent.

This is the sort of news story that if you were freaking out about crime in the 1970s, 1980s or even 2022, this looks like a kind of miracle. And so that's one part of the paradox of violence that is this megatrend. The other part is that if you look abroad, and the Uppsala data conflict does a really, really good job of compiling this data, the number of interstate and intrastate conflicts around the world have soared.

We're talking about cartel violence in Latin America, interstate conflict in Africa. And then, of course, the more famous wars in Gaza and Ukraine and elsewhere. The number of conflicts around the world are surging. And I'm just very interested in the fact that these two things are happening at the same time. A historic peace wave in America coinciding with an under-covered explosion of interstate and intrastate conflict around the world.

ZAKARIA: And the last one affects the media. And it's really about what A.I. has done to media. What's the trend here?

THOMPSON: Well, I suppose if you're someone who's very interested in A.I. and its effect to the media, you have this sort of question that's hanging in front of you, which is, is A.I. going to lead to just more media or is it going to lead to better media? Are we talking about quantity or quality? And looking at the data and being completely objective? The answer is that for now, it is leading to a revolution in quantity and not quality.

The number of e-books, and this is mostly A.I. slop, but the number of e-books published on Amazon and Kindle has absolutely exploded since ChatGPT came out. If you're an academic journal, you have seen an absolutely explosive influx of science papers that when scientists actually look at the way these papers are written, they conclude that they are overwhelmingly, at least half written by artificial intelligence.

If you're an HR department, at the same time, you're probably dealing with hundreds of thousands, millions of applications from college students and beyond, in part because what does A.I. do to the resume? It makes it very easy for you to copy and paste. And rather than apply to, say, 30 jobs, which is what I applied to when I graduated from college in 2008, I know for a fact, having talked to college counseling offices, that you -- or career counseling offices that there are students applying to hundreds, even up to 1,000 jobs per person. A.I. is leading to a world where we are becoming simply inundated with media quantity.

And we're going to need to develop some kind of countervailing force, some kind of defense mechanism or process by which academic journals weed out the A.I. slop, companies weed out the obvious A.I. slop. This is going to be a huge new challenge that A.I. simply sort of puts media on steroids and creates this revolution of quantity long before it creates a revolution of quality.

ZAKARIA: All right, and one of my mechanisms to find the signal amidst the noise is to read Derek Thompson's Substack blog. Derek, always a pleasure to have you on.

THOMPSON: Thank you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, around the world and right here in America, liberal democracy is being challenged. It makes people wonder, is the democratic model still viable? I'll bring you an all-star panel of thinkers when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:35:49]

ZAKARIA: In 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama penned a seminal essay entitled "The End of History." In it, he argued the decline of communism marked the end of humankind's ideological evolution and predicted that liberal democracy would ultimately triumph around the world. Nearly four decades later, that model of government is under strain. From the rise of authoritarianism around the globe to deepening political polarization and decline in public trust in democracies, there are signs that liberal democracy may be in retreat.

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, I talked about it with three great guests, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland, David French, a New York Times columnist, and Frank Fukuyama himself, whom you will hear from first.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, SENIOR FELLOW, STANFORD INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES: So in many ways, since this is an ideas festival, a question to ask is, is there actually an idea of a superior form of social and political economic organization than the kind of liberalism, liberal democracy that we've seen? And I have to say there are certainly competitors. You have a Chinese model, you have an Iranian model, but which one of these is really likely to become universalized and seen as a substitute or a higher stage of human development? And I have not seen that in that period.

However, you have real world events, and there's no question that we're in a period of deep backsliding. You've got the consolidation of Russia and China authoritarian systems that are clearly from the get- go not democratic. I think one of the most surprising developments is the growth of populist movements, above all in the United States, that have rejected certain institutional features, particularly the rule of law, in one of the countries that really established the rule of law and constitutional government as the norm.

But I do think that it's helpful to take a longer term historical view. We have been through setbacks to democracy before. We had the most serious one really in the 1930s and 40s with the rise of Stalinism and fascism. We had a lot of discouragement over democracy after the oil crises in the 1970s when people asked, can democracy survive?

And I would say that the game is not over by any means because there are good reasons why, for economic, political, social reasons, liberal democracy remains a system that is durable and sustainable in the way that authoritarian government is not. And we can get into this, but I do think that there's already signs of a turnaround in this 20-year backsliding that we've seen.

ZAKARIA: It feels to me that the argument of the populist right is that this world that liberal democracy or liberalism has created, and I mean liberalism in the old-fashioned sense of enlightenment liberalism, is too much a world of rules and constraints and elites and process, and that what you really need is the rule of strong men and strong gods. So tell us whether you think there is a coherent right-wing critique of this and where it's going.

DAVID FRENCH, OPINION COLUMNIST, NEW YORK TIMES: Here's a sort of slogan you hear all the time on the right. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times. Strong men need to come back to restore from hard to good. And so you kind of have this history -- this cycle throughout history. And then the other thing that they say is that one thing that liberal, small-L liberalism does is it destroys through increased emphasis on individualism. This is a very big part of the attack.

[10:39:56]

An increased emphasis on individualism leads also to civilizational weakness by degrading pre-liberal institutions. In other words, individualism degrades the family. Individualism degrades the church. Individualism degrades your bonds with civic associations. There have been some degradation in some of these really important pre-liberal institutions. There has been degradation in the family. We have a lot more broken families when you used to. There has been very dramatically declining, although leveling off now, sort of church attendance. There has been a fracturing of sort of these civic associations and these civic bonds that are decaying.

And so in many ways, a critic of liberalism is able to identify some legitimate problems that do exist. And then everything starts to fall apart as they do -- as they start to pivot to, OK, now what? And when they're pivoting to the, OK, now what, is when we start walking through the museum of wretched ideas, because we're not talking about the revival or we're not talking about the invention of new and interesting ideologies to combat liberal democracy. We're talking about the revival of ancient hatreds and authoritarianisms.

So you're seeing on the young right, rising interest in fascism, 34 percent or so of young Americans express some affection for communism. You're seeing tariffs, yes, tariffs, that's a great idea, never been tried. And then sort of this -- and sort of the most malignant thing is this rising anti-Semitism, which is tapping into some of these ancient hatreds and ancient maladies of authoritarianism. And then, oh yes, we've got a guy going for a land war in Europe. That works out really well for all of us. And so again and again and again, they're turning to these dark ideas.

CHRYSTIA FREELAND, FORMER CANADIAN DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: I want to pick up on something that Frank said. I think that we're going to look back on the spring of 2026 as the turning point when liberal democracy around the world started to fight back and successfully win. And it's, yes, I think we will. I think Minneapolis is really important. I think Orban's defeat in Hungary is really important. And I think the most important thing is Ukraine. I should also put my cards on the table. I am an economic advisor to President Zelenskyy. It's an unpaid volunteer role, but it's a formal one.

So I've picked a side. But what I think is important to understand about Ukraine's battlefield success is, you know, the fight between authoritarianism and liberal democracy in Ukraine, it's not rhetorical. It's not about who has the best memes or the cutest talking points. It's about who lives and who dies and who wins and who loses. And what's remarkable about Ukraine is they are actually winning because they are a multicultural, decentralized, feminist democracy.

There are 70,000 Ukrainian women fighting in combat positions. And but for them, it's not a culture war thing. For them, it is about being a democracy and everyone pitching in and everyone doing what they can do to be free, being smart and ingenious and fighting back. And I think, you know, if the Ukrainians can do it, I think the rest of us should be able to do it, too.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

[10:43:58]

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, there's at least one country that has eschewed the right-wing populist wave sweeping the globe, a nation where liberal democracy seems to be actually thriving. What country is that and what can the United States learn from its success? That's up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Back now with more of my conversation with Chrystia Freeland, the former deputy prime minister of Canada, David French, The New York Times columnist and Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: I want to ask about a place where liberalism, centrist liberalism has succeeded, Canada. I think we don't give enough credit to Canada, right? There's this other place up north that didn't rebel against the British Empire that had no declaration of independence. It's kind of turned out OK, right? Like Canada doesn't seem like a case study in some horrendous, you know, dystopian version of what would have happened had we not had the declaration of independence, which always, you know, tempers my sense of celebration about, about all of it.

And I noticed now that Canada is ruled by, in fact, has been ruled by two centrist liberals for the last, you know, for the last almost a dozen years. Why are you guys not succumbing to this kind of right- wing populist wave that seems to be sweeping the rest of the world?

[10:50:05] FREELAND: The immediate answer is Donald Trump. So we're very aware as a country of what happens in the United States and the election of Donald, the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024 made Canadians absolutely believers in liberal democracy. And really made us recognize that it's an existential crisis for us and we had to be united and we had to be united behind a party. My party actually called the liberal party.

What I will say though, is I would urge Americans as you think about liberal democracy fighting back, don't just think about doing it in your own country. Think about how you are going to restore America's place as a leader of the global alliance of liberal democracies. And I say that because it's better for the rest of us if you do that, but it's better for you too. What really worries me about a post-American world is if America is not on the side of liberal democracy and leading that fight, the rest of us are going to be engaged in a balancing act with China.

We haven't talked about China here, but I think that the real challenge to liberal democracy is not the MAGA model. I don't think that actually works very well economically. It's the China model. And if we don't have an America, which is a strong liberal democracy at home, a strong and generous ally of its liberal democratic partners around the world, China is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger and going to make more and more inroads into our own countries. And one day we may wake up and actually say, yes, history ended and it's Chinese state capitalism that has won. And I think that would be a terrible outcome.

ZAKARIA: Why is it that most Western democracies seem to be stuck in this crisis of governance? And we've talked about it for a while, you know, people have come up with. Why is it that it seems impossible to do anything other than talk about it? Why does it not seem to get better?

FUKUYAMA: I do think that there is something common across liberal democracies, which is its inability to get things done, to build things. And the reason for that is actually kind of intrinsic in liberalism. Liberalism is about the rule of law, but many liberal countries have too many laws. You know, this is the one part of the conservative critique that I take seriously. You need the rule of law. You do not want to create a situation where you have a Trump or an Elon Musk that simply says, let's just forget about law, just do what we want.

But law is a real problem. I mean, it is a real constraint. It leads to something that I call vetocracy, meaning rule by veto, where many of our countries, we have so many players in the political system who can stop something from happening. I do think that there is a common problem that is experienced by many liberal democracies today.

ZAKARIA: So you do have a bunch of Republicans who do get stuff done. I mean, Ron DeSantis actually runs Florida quite well. If you look at Texas, they are able to build, they have built more solar and wind than California without any subsidies, any preferential treatment, just because it's so damn easy to build anything in Texas, right? And so you can get pipelines, you can get whatever you need, wind farms. Is this the sign of a kind of post-Trump MAGA right?

FRENCH: Well, I think it's very important to draw a distinction between the National Republican Party, which is, it's hard for me to find a lot of hope there, just to be honest. The state Republican parties are handling things different state by state, but many of them are doing quite innovative things. So, for example, the Mississippi miracle in reading is something that every state should be looking at, but a lot of people will not look at it because it's Mississippi and because it's a red state and it's going to be MAGA coded and all of this.

So we have to be open to solutions from interesting places and from people with whom you have disagreements. We have to be open to that. And the one thing that I would say about democracy that I do think is a common thread overseas and here, is a lot of the problem with our current liberal democracies is they don't have as much democracy as they should. So a perfect example is here in the United States. Think about this guys, 80 percent of us live in one party states where it's a trifecta, all blue or all red, and it's about evenly divided, 39 percent in blue trifecta states, 41 percent in red trifecta. Of the remaining 19 point something percent, most of us live in single party districts.

[10:55:27]

So we can't think of America as having a two party system anymore, it has two one party systems. And one party systems are almost always going to be deeply flawed. So we're getting almost like none of the benefits of the two party system and all of the maladies of the one party system being channeled through two highly polarized separating regions of the United States of America. So when I say what are some of the problems of the liberal democracy right now, one of the answers is not enough democracy.

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

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