Transcript
Fareed Zakaria (0:02)
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, Donald Trump's biggest global disruption, sky high tariffs on foreign goods. Tariff, to me is the most beautiful word, is in the hands of the Supreme Court. Is it possible that America's highest court will strike them down? I will ask two constitutional scholars, John, you and Noah Feldman. Also, the stock market is at record levels, and the Financial Times has said that 80% of the market's gains this year are accounted for by one industry, artificial intelligence. Are we in an AI bubble? I'll ask Andrew Ross Sorkin, the author of a new book about the Crash of 1929. But first, here's my take. For some years now, the Democratic Party looked as if it could do nothing right. It lost the presidency twice to Donald Trump. The Biden victory looking more like an interregnum now. Once solid blue states turned red, its working class base eroded. In 2024, even non white voters drifted away. This week's elections mark a reprieve and perhaps the start of a recovery, but only if Democrats draw the right lessons. The race that drew the most attention was Zoran Mamdani's, a stunning rise from near obscurity just 10 months ago. But Mandani is a singular figure, unusually charismatic and politically deft. And New York City is unlike most of America. He won with 50% of the vote. Bill de Blasio won his 2013 race with 73%. The more telling bellwether was Virginia, a state with a popular outgoing Republican governor, where Democrat Abigail Spamberger trounced her opponent by nearly 15 points. Mikey Sherrill did the same in New Jersey, winning the governor's mansion by 13. Both women ran as centrist Democrats focused on the economy and studiously avoided getting drawn into the culture war. Declaring Even Mamdani, though clearly progressive, ran a campaign relentlessly centered on affordability. There's an ongoing debate within the Democratic Party about whether to move left on economics or right on culture. That debate misses a deeper shift in American life. The largest chunk of voters still say the economy is their top concern. But they increasingly view the economy through a partisan lens. When their party is in power, they think the economy is strong. When the other side takes over, that same economy suddenly looks dire. In effect, politics now shapes people's sense of economic reality, not the other way around. And people choose their political tribe using two markers. The left has long struggled to navigate culture and class across the democratic world. The pattern is familiar, as I outline in my book Age of Revolutions. In the changes of recent decades, globalization, the digital revolution, mass migration, new gender and identity norms have produced a backlash that is primarily cultural. It has appeared in countries that have boomed, like the US And Poland, and in those that have stagnated, like France and Italy. It's arisen where inequality is high, as in America, and where it's low, as in Sweden or the Netherlands. It's shaken economies that still make things Germany and those that rely on services like Britain. A 2023 Ipsos global trend survey showed that in many advanced democracies, large majorities think the world is changing too fast, including 75% in Germany and nearly 90% in South Korea. The right has learned to weaponize people's unease, offering a story that is emotionally coherent even when factually thin. It promises a return to the world many people remember, if only the global elites are cast down. The left, by contrast, tends to counter emotion with information. But people do not want to be told that they are wrong to feel uneasy. They want leaders who acknowledge that unease and help them navigate it. If culture has been the first great shock to the modern left, class has been the second. The divide today is not between capitalists and workers. It's between those who flourish in a credential, driven economy and those who feel locked out of it. The right has exploited that perception masterfully. Trump's movement has never followed through on an anti elitist economics. His cabinets have been packed with billionaires. But it has been ferociously anti elitist in culture. His enemy is not the hedge funder but the Harvard professor, not the CEO, but the columnist. The professors are the enemy, nixon once quipped, and JD Vance has repeated the line. Trump turned it into a strategy waging war on America's cultural institutions. This inversion the rich as rebels, the educated as oppressors has redrawn the map of American politics. In 1996, Bill Clinton won voters without college degrees by 14 points. By 2024, Kamala Harris lost that same block by 14 points. The answer is not to tear down the meritocratic elite. The alternative is worse an aristocracy of birth or the family and friends cabal surrounding Donald Trump's White House. Better to rebuild a genuine democratic meritocracy, one that wields its advantages with humility and a sense of stewardship. That means expanding access to education and networks so that mobility is real, while cultivating leaders who can see beyond their class and credentials. Renewal and reconnection are possible. Denmark offers a model. Prime Minister Mete Fredriksen tightened immigration rules and demanded integration, but those measures are paired with robust social investment. Critics on the left called the prime minister's approach illiberal, but it worked. The Danish Social Democrats coalition won a majority in 2022, and the party had its best performance in two decades. The lesson for Democrats is not to copy Denmark's laws but to emulate its sensibility. That means marrying the party's best instincts compassion, inclusion, reform with a tone of steadiness and respect. It means remembering that patriotism is not the property of the right, the that liberalism, too, can speak the language of tradition. In the 19th century, nationalism and liberalism rose together as revolts against imperial hierarchy and arbitrary rule. The task now is to reunite them, to make the national project a liberal project rooted in dignity, pluralism and fairness. Right wing populism is not destiny, it's nostalgia. Liberal democracy has been counted out many times before only to prove itself remarkably resilient, because in the end, it remains the best roadmap, because it addresses the most powerful yearnings of human beings for betterment, progress and for freedom. Go to fareedzakharia.com for a link to my Washington Post column this week and to buy my book, now out in paperback anywhere books are sold. And let's get started. This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that President Trump has called life or death for the country his unilateral authority to impose sweeping tariffs. The tariff agenda broadly began on Liberation Day in April, when he upended decades of American free trade policies by announcing broad levies on imports from around the world. He was relying on a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers act, or IEPA. But at Wednesday's Supreme Court arguments, many justices, including conservatives, questioned whether this law actually gives the president the power he claims. To unpack it all, I'm joined by two constitutional scholars. Noah Feldman is a law professor at the Harvard Law School. He was recently named a university professor, which is Harvard University's highest distinction for a faculty member. And John Yoo is a former Justice Department official under the Bush administration and a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Welcome, gentlemen. Let's get right into it. So the Trump administration's claim was that the president has this authority because this was not a case of raising taxes, which clearly the Constitution gives Congress the authority to do, and that it has the power to do this under these emergency provisions. Noah, are those arguments persuasive?