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May 11, 2003
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
A Beautiful Mind Made For Our Complicated Times
He's
the new glamour boy of the national media. Bestselling author. Columnist
for Newsweek magazine. Editor of Newsweek International. Regular guest
on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." New York magazine last
month described him as "silky and unflappable," "dimple-chinned, with
expressive eyebrows" and said he could be both "the Indian incarnation
of Cary Grant" and "the first Muslim secretary of State."
There's only one
problem with this panting adulation. "I'm not really all
that interesting," says Fareed Zakaria. "I'm not rich. I'm not that famous.
I'm not that glamorous. I have two kids under the age of 4, and when I'm
not working, I'm hanging out with my family. When I read about myself,
I say, 'Sounds like a fascinating guy. I'd love to know him.' But it isn't
quite me." Zakaria's seeming
modesty is part of his charm. But it isn't his charm, his good looks or
his journalistic ubiquity that have made him a media star, still eight
months shy of his 40th birthday. It's his mind. At a time when political
discourse seems increasingly polarized, superficial and confrontational,
Zakaria's thoughtful analyses are original, carefully modulated, difficult
to pigeonhole on the traditional ideological spectrum--and accessible
to open minds of all ages. Zakaria was in Los
Angeles recently to address students at Harvard-Westlake School in North
Hollywood as part of the school's Brown Family Speaker Series. Through
several sessions, in a variety of settings, the high school students'
response was universally enthusiastic--indeed rapt. Older, less impressionable
minds have found themselves equally riveted. Zakaria doesn't speak
in sound bites or epithets, and it's difficult, in the space allotted
to a newspaper column, to capture either his thought processes or his
ability to articulate his positions. But as Mark Whitaker, the editor
of Newsweek, says, "Fareed has a clear sense of the issues and he can
talk about them and write about them in a nonfussy, nonpedantic way."
Making it clear
Zakaria first came to national prominence three weeks after the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks, when he wrote a 7,000-word cover story for Newsweek
titled "The Politics of
Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?"
His answer: Islamic countries had imported elements of our culture--"Cadillacs, Gulfstreams
and McDonald's" -- but they had found it far more "difficult and dangerous"
to import what he called "the inner stuffings of modern society--a free
market, political parties, accountability and the rule of law."
"The Arab world is a political desert with no real political parties,
no free press, few pathways for dissent," he wrote. "As a result, the
mosque turned into the place to discuss politics.
"If there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism,"
he wrote, "it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab
world."
That's why, Zakaria says, "Islam became the language of political opposition.
At first, most of the people who became terrorists tried to overturn their
own regimes--in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan But it's tough to do that under
a dictatorship. The U.S., as a free, democratic society, is a much softer
target.
"Bin Laden's genius," Zakaria says, "was that he said, 'Stop worrying
about your own countries, and let's attack the head of the snake--the
United States--because it supports all those regimes you dislike.' "
Zakaria arguments have been widely quoted--in part, no doubt, because
he is a Muslim, "someone able to take readers inside these cultures and
make what they did seem more understandable, without saying it was OK,"
as he puts it.
Whitaker says Zakaria's Newsweek story "had more impact than any analytical
piece I can remember"--and that's just what he was looking for when he
hired Zakaria after reading a book review he'd written in the New Republic. Zakaria was 18 when he came to the United States from India. He studied
at Yale and went to graduate school at Harvard, but even though he'd had
summer internships at various magazines, he never really thought of himself
as a journalist.
"I probably aspired to the role of public intellectual an academic and
a writer of sorts," he says, "but I hadn't thought about where that would
be."
Then, in his final semester at Harvard, he had lunch with a friend who
suggested he apply for the job of editor of Foreign Affairs magazine.
He got the job and he was off and writing--insightfully and provocatively.
When Zakaria and I had breakfast recently, I asked how he felt about
some journalists' characterization of him as a Reaganite conservative.
He said that had been true when he was in college, "but the spectrum has
shifted so much that I'm really a centrist. I'm generally in favor of
low taxes, for example, but I don't think a big tax cut now is a good
idea."
Similarly, while Zakaria strongly supports President Bush's decision
to attack Iraq, he's used such phrases as "diplomatic hypocrisy" and "disaster"
to describe the administration's prewar foreign policy, and he's critical
of the "carte blanche" the government now has to monitor potential terrorist
activity in the United States. He also thinks Bush "has an allergy to
the United Nations" and is sacrificing U.S. credibility by not allowing
U.N. inspectors to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq now.
Zakaria is equally critical of the news media, saying they were "insufficiently
skeptical" and didn't press the administration hard enough to "define
the nature of the shadowy, nebulous threat" the administration invoked
to justify the war.
"I'm socially liberal and often find myself out of sync with what the
conservative establishment believes," Zakaria says, but he's less concerned
with labels and litmus tests than with "the lack of any space in today's
climate for people who think through problems without regard to where
they wind up on the political spectrum."
Democracy and capitalism
In his book, The
Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Zakaria
argues that in trying to export democracy to other countries, the United
States has often mistakenly equated democracy with free elections, whereas
he thinks both capitalism and order must come first.
"After all," as he points out, "Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany
through free elections."
Capitalism, Zakaria says, "embodies the concept of individual property
rights," and that requires the rule of law and judges to interpret the
laws. He's skeptical about the ability of a country with an oil-based
economy to follow that paradigm. "If you have treasure in the ground,
you don't have to create those kinds of structures aboveground, so you
don't get political candidates who have to campaign on health care or
tax cuts. With no real issues, you wind up electing thugs who just say,
'Trust us--we'll take care of you.' "
As Zakaria wrote last month in another Newsweek cover story, "How
to Wage the Peace," adapted from his book: "Easy money means a government
doesn't have to tax its people When a government takes money from its
people, the people demand something in return eventually, democracy. This
bargain, between taxation and representation, is at the heart of Western
liberty."
Zakaria's "taxation without representation" argument clearly resonated,
not only with Newsweek readers but with the students at Harvard-Westlake,
most of whom had studied that issue more recently than most of the rest
of us.
As Thomas Hudnut, the school's headmaster, said after Zakaria's presentation
at a campus-wide assembly:
"When was the last time you saw 850 kids sit so quiet for an hour that
you could hear a pin drop? This shows what happens when you talk up to
students, instead of talking down to them."
The same, I think, could be said of adult audiences. The success of screaming
heads on television notwithstanding, I think Zakaria's emergence demonstrates
that there's a genuine hunger in the American public for intelligent,
articulate commentary on world events.
If Bill O'Reilly, Chris Mathews and their loud-mouthed ilk would just
shut up a few minutes, maybe we could hear it.