← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
The Rise of Islam and the Radicalization of America
00:30:39
Loading summary
Transcript12 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:07]
B
Welcome back, everybody, to what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute and the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Walter's on the road this week. So just a note that today's episode is pre recorded from last week when we deliberately chose topics a bit more off the news cycle than usual. All right, Walter, we'll do three topics of conversation this week. So the first one, which you could loosely call the rise of Islam in American and global affairs, by which I mean not simply religious growth, but the kind of rapid emergence of Muslim majority states as serious players at the heights of global power. So you've got Saudi Arabia and the UAE being positioned as strategic AI hubs with US Approved exports of advanced chips to Gulf companies that are tied to these major data center ambitions. You've got the Gulf sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates surfacing in major American media investment structures, including this Paramount Warner Brothers discovery deal, which in the US has raised some questions about foreign influence over news and entertainment. And then of course, you've got Khadr's role as the largest disclosed source of foreign funding to US Colleges and think tanks. So this rise of Muslim majority powers in Western media, finance, academia, infrastructure, frontier technology, this of course, was not always the case, not even very recently. So kind of historically, what do you make of all this?
- [01:44]
A
Yeah, look, this is a bigger story than I think a lot of people realize. And it puts a lot of things together because it's even more than just the rise of states like Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries. If you think about the world of 50, 75 years ago, there were just not that many people with an Islamic background who were functioning at the sort of highest level of the corporate world, the financial world, international institutions. Most of the Islamic countries were coming out of a post colonial era. Their educated elites were tiny. Their presence in world politics was smaller than their demographic footprint. But what we're seeing, what we've seen in the last generation is an explosion of highly educated, very sophisticated people. Some of them are Western Muslim, you know, born in the west, of Muslim immigrant ancestry. Some of them are citizens of states. But if you think about how many Arabs and others have been educated, it's true of Iranians as well educated in the US or other Western schools and are now in institutions ranging from McKinsey to the world Bank. I mean, you can sort of name it. There's a much Islam itself has changed in Some ways, I mean, I don't speak about the doctrines of the religion, but you have a much, sort of a much greater degree of human capital in the Islamic world. And you have different layers of reflection on the Islamic experience, Islamic culture. But at the same time you also have, you know, it's still Islam, it's still Islam. And so you see, I think it has different effects. Noble minds are affected in really quite noble ways by Islamic culture, civilization, philosophy. Smaller minds are affected in smaller ways. So you get the kind of close minded zeal that can go into fanaticism, fundamentalism and radical extremism. But the whole substance of Islamic civilization is achieving greater weight in the world. I think that's one of the biggest, big facts of our time, that people, we haven't really connected the dots. We say, oh, Muslims in Europe, oh wow. One notices that more and more intellectuals and politicians in America are coming out of Islamic backgrounds. And then we notice that these Gulf states have a lot of weight in the world. But we don't put it all together and think about what it means in a more profound way.
- [04:40]
B
And what about the kind of, I don't know how to put this, but the spread of the religion and the culture itself. So Muslims are a lot more visible and influential in Europe now than they were in the relatively recent past. A lot of Islamic Africa is engaged in quite a few wars with Christians in Africa. What used to be the old Indian subcontinent has been kind of fighting various, in some cases losing wars, Hindus against Muslims. I mean, kind of what's the state of the spread of the religion and the culture right now?
- [05:20]
A
Well, again, I would say you've got a lot of different. We're talking about almost 2 billion people, so generalization. And we're talking about people who are from European background, sub African background, Indian subcontinent, Arabs. So many different cultures, many different civilizations, many different layers of civilization, national experience, personal experience. So this is an extremely complicated phenomenon. And I think one of the reasons the public discussion of it often gets so sort of charged, and I would say often not very useful, is that people fasten on one aspect of it and say, okay, that's everything. So if, you know, I'm worried about jihadis, that's everything. Or if I'm worried about Qatari bribery, that's everything. Or if I'm happy that Muslim immigrants in America are gaining more political space, that's everything. It's all of these things and it's more things. But I think I would say that if we look historically back from the origins of Islam to the present day. There is no one pattern that characterizes the relationship of Islam with other cultures and civilizations. That is, there have been periods of war, often periods that Islamic societies initiated, often periods that their opponents initiated. The Byzantines would say their wars were in self defense, as I think the Crusaders were, and the Muslims would have a different answer to that. We're not going to solve any of those controversies, both the, you know, and then on the other hand, you have, as you had in the early centuries of the Islamic presence in Spain, a different, you know, a kind of civilizational flowering. And you've seen places where Islam spread relatively peacefully, the sort of merchants in South India and Indonesia following the trade winds. And then you've seen, you know, wars of conquest. So, you know, how does it all. To say that Islam is, you know, is sort of recovering from a, you know, a 2 century slumber of sorts is not to be able to predict in some casual way, okay, it's going to cause X or Y, it's going to cause a lot of things. Some very interesting, some not so interesting, or some rather alarming. One thing I would say is that participation in American life has changed the members of every religion that is present in the United States to a significant degree. You know, the Protestant Christianity today in the US has changed from what the Puritans brought with them in 1620. Catholicism has perhaps changed the most profoundly in that the sort of experience of living in a democratic, liberal society actually contributed enormously to the deep changes that the Catholic Church underwent at the Second Vatican Council, the theological changes, as well as changes in practice. And you can see among the sort of generation of American Islamic intellectuals, I think of people like Mustafa Akial, who writes about the need to rediscover a Burkean tradition and the importance of separating religion from the state, the importance of not using compulsion in matters of religion. You can see the beginnings of an emergence of a different way of thinking, an Americanist Islam. Where that goes, how significant it will be, I can't possibly say. But for religion to undergo the kind of renaissance that Islam is doing means that not just one thing comes out of it. Lots of trends, and only in hindsight would people be able to say, okay, these were the ones that mattered.
- [09:47]
B
All right, second topic. So there was the armed attack at the White House Correspondents Dinner recently, right? It was the, of course, the killing of Charlie Kirk, the Minnesota shootings, the other attempts on Trump's life. I saw a story that politically motivated attacks in 2025 had doubled from the year before. I'm not sure how statistically significant that is, but this does often feel to a lot of people, and I assume to a lot of our listeners, like one of many factors, in the sense that the country's coming unglued in certain ways is both liberals and conservatives radicalize in their own ways or maybe in similar ways. So what are your thoughts on this unfortunate trend circa May 2026?
- [10:39]
A
I do notice some commentators on the right are pretty quick to say, boy, it's all coming from the left. There's nothing on the right. Sort of. No. Reminds me of the time I visited the Hiroshima Museum in the nuclear museum in Hiroshima, and the sort of tone of the museum was, well, we were sitting here peacefully minding our own business, when one day, out of a clear blue sky for no reason whatever. Right, okay. The background is complicated, and to try to put all the blame on one side or the other, I think is just. Is actually to exacerbate the underlying problems rather than to be part of a process of constructively thinking through and working on them. We have to say that if you're on the left, liberal or progressive, number of the things that the Trump administration has done or tried to do are pretty alarming. It's not simply for something like ICE that they are often pushing to and even beyond the limits of what's constitutionally or legally permissible in the way they're handling suspects and so on and so forth. It's that, you know, there are questions about is this the creation of a kind of a proto secret police or, you know, force that's going to be politically aligned with one group, you know, one political party, one tendency, you know, what, what's happening here. And if you want to, on the left, you can find lots of reasons for feeding your, your paranoia, or let's say more neutrally concerns about some kind of proto fascist takeover in the United States. Be that as it may, what we have seen and are seeing is a radicalization of normies, particularly on the left. Not because the left is psychologically worse than the right or morally necessarily, but because the right's in power and the left is afraid. So people who would normally never dream of things like assassinations or violence or whatever are dreaming of it. And in some cases, we see the sort of support, the sympathy for the person accused of killing the health company executive. We're seeing, you know, we've seen some expressions of grief that various assassination attempts on Trump have not succeeded from the kinds of people who normally wouldn't. Do you know, who are normally much too sensible and grounded for anything this idiotic. And if I may say, in my view at least evil. And that's not a good thing. And I think we will see should, you know, should things flip in 28 and we see Democratic President, Democratic House, Democratic Senate, I think there'll be a lot of people on the right taking out their trusty copies of the second Amendment and the trustee accoutrement of the second Amendment lets you apply and start thinking, okay, well, we may have to defend our liberties. So this is not good. And it's, but it's real. And I certainly know and respect a lot of folks on the left who have, you know, who are really kind of off. I want to say, well, I guess I will say off on the, off on the deep end here. I went through some of this, let me confess in my misspent youth. I remember in 1972, hearing, I think at the Republican convention and please don't, you know, don't like go back and hit me over the head because I don't after 50 years remember the exact wording. But I think, you know, speaker at the Republican National Convention said the United States, with 6% of the world's population, consumes 52% of the world's resources and we aim to keep it that way. And you know, my 20 year old self was, was both morally outraged and politically discombobulated by this. You know, it seemed like, you know, such a power of greed and evil and here it was being expressed by a major party and a lot of folks in the 70s went through this kind of radicalization. Some ended up, you know, actually making bombs and stuff like that. So it's a temptation that's always there in a democratic society. And at a time like now when rapid social and technological change has sort of made it made many of us feel that, you know, the guardrails are gone and American society is kind of hurtling through space and we have absolutely no idea what the destination is going to be or what the, if any of the old rules still apply. But I would say to our listeners, who I hope are the pretty calm people as a group, that it's still better to keep yourself grounded. Assassinating Trump or assassinating AOC or I don't care who, regardless of the fact that murder is evil and you shouldn't do it or countenance it is also politically stupid. America's problems Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, Donald Trump is not the cause of the difficulties that America is experiencing now. Even more than you know any more than Nancy Pelosi is. Our problems as a society are bigger than our political leadership, and the issues go deeper. And to think that you could somehow make America great again by pruning a few noisome blossoms from the shrubbery is a profound mistake.
- [17:09]
B
Previous periods in American history of this kind of political radicalization, what got us out of it? Was it greater economic growth than an economic boom, and the pie grows and people become less politically fixated? Is it some sort of external shock where the country unites around, you know, a war, external threat? I mean, how could we expect to get out of this?
- [17:34]
A
Well, you know, the one that, I mean, I can probably speak with about the most authority is what happened, you know, sort of in this. All through the 60s and first half of the 70s, America seemed to be spiraling deeper into chaos, violence. I mean, much, much greater levels of violence than anything that we've seen today. And there were several things going on, I think, that drove that and then helped us get out of it. One was you had just a very large generation, the baby boomers. And I know it's hard for younger people today to realize this, but we were pretty radical, rowdy lot in our youth. We genuinely believed that we were the first post American generation, that the American dream would not work for us. We would be the first generation with lower living standards than our parents. We had broken with the conventional morality. My generation was the first, was sort of shacking up rather than getting married was considered a totally normal thing. We went from shacking up to living together. Experiments with drugs, different attitudes on race, the. The first waves of feminism, first waves of gay liberation, along with the civil rights revolution, the Vietnam War and Watergate, all bombing the minds of a young generation that was a very large generation and had a lot of power. I think we can see some of that with today's younger people. It's a big generation. It's living in a world that feels very different from past generations. It feels the existence of a generation gap. And that it doesn't. Its experience isn't teaching it to trust and respect its elders. In fact, its experience is teaching it to mistrust and suspect its elders. So I think when you have that, you're going to have a period of dislocation and chaos. What happened, I think, in our case was less than any that any of America's big problems got solved, but that American society had enough opportunity and enough way forward that a kid who at 22 is thinking, how do I change the world at 32 is thinking, what school do I want my kids to go to? And so the generation of the energy of that generation got diverted from grand social transformation to building the foundations of a good life. And most of us actually in the boomers, you know, we've done okay. So. And my guess is that that will be true for the next generation. Now, I think what makes it a bit more acute, and this, you know, this is only one of the explanations, but what makes it a bit more acute is that people are delaying marriage and settling down longer and a slightly larger proportion isn't doing it at all. Again, for the boomers, a BA was really about as far as it went with most people. And a lot of people didn't even go that far. Degree inflation, you could still actually have a reasonable job with a high school diploma and certainly an aa, an associate's degree was actually a legitimate ticket and a BA was all you needed to enter all but a handful of professions. Now, you know, you gotta get a master's, People are working on more degrees, staying in school longer. So you get started on life younger, older, you don't think to yourself, well, I'm getting these years back at the other end, so my net worth is going to end up being as large or larger than my parents. You think when my parents were my age, they had X, they had Y, and look at me, I'm living in a hovel, in a dump, and I have nothing, right? And then a few things, you know, the cost of college and the cost of healthcare are problematic. But I do think the odds favor, over time, a lot of people settling down and getting, you know, getting engaged with life, which is not simply a route to social peace, it's a route to personal fulfillment and joy. You know, once you're built, you're building something for you that you've chosen that is meaningful to you, that involves people that you love. And at that point you have a difference. Your center of gravity is less and less in social media and you know, what's happening out there in the world and what are happening, happening to black white relations in Atlanta, it's more like, you know, what's happening to me, to my kids. If I'm interested in race relations, it's like the family across the street or the kids at my kids schools, whatever, it's different. So that will be part of it. And in general, as that happens, as a new generation, big generation settles in and starts working, the economy starts doing better, you have a lot of people working creatively and intensively doing their best to Figure out how can I be more efficient, more productive, how can I make more money, how can I find a channel forward and that translate, all of those small decisions by individuals translate into energy and renewal in the economy. So unless we really screw it up, I think we've got, you know, that may be the most likely thing to come. I don't put 100% probability on that, but I think that's the sort of default likelihood, certainly. I hope so.
- [23:45]
B
All right, final topic, a softball. You can focus on whatever trends or metrics you want to answer the question, but you've noted before on the show how America's been supposedly declining your whole life and yet it keeps not declining at the end of the day, at least relative to the rest of the world. So again, Circa Spring, summer 2026, is America finally declining for the first time in your lifetime?
- [24:11]
A
You know, I've just, just written a column about how, you know, after all of the talk about American decline, you know, Putin may be remembered as the man who broke Russia. Yet again, I think we're seeing the perception of American decline, but nothing is saying to me that we're seeing the reality of American decline in comparative terms with other great powers. Certainly the people who have been, I think, most eloquent in their descriptions and analysis of the causes of American decline often live in the European Union. And what, you know, and the sort of initial point for them was what they considered America's grotesque overreaction to the war, to the attacks of 91 1, including the Iraq war, and have been predicting massive American decline as a result of this. And yet, you know, a quarter century later, the question is whether Europe is considered a great power, not whether the United States is considered one. Again, a lot of this has to do with, you know, you don't have to be the fastest zebra to survive and you don't have to be faster than the fastest lion. You have to be faster than just enough other zebras so you don't get eaten. I think with China, we're looking at a stagnating economy. We are looking at real problems with the Chinese export driven growth model and its and the real estate market, none of which they've been able to fix. They have. The Chinese government in theory has absolute power, is able to do anything it wants, but it can't wean Chinese industry off this need for ever increasing volumes of exports that turn the rest of the world against it. They can't wean themselves away from the kind of internal development model that is seeing hundreds of millions of Chinese lose 20, 30% of their life savings and more in this enormous real estate bubble. So I would say that the way to, best way to think about all of this is that the 21st century is hard. We all, every society is having to deal with unexpected developments. Economies are changing, technologies are changing, financial markets are changing in ways that are very hard to predict or regulate. Income distributions are changing, Class differences are changing. Identity politics is re. Emerging in lots of places. All of this is making it harder for every society to make smart choices and to cope with just, you know, the incoming stuff. Right. And so America, like everybody else, is having trouble. But I think our core competency, one of our key national comparative advantages has been that actually we are, we have historically been better at accommodating change, harnessing change and living with the disruption and stress of change than other global societies. That still seems to me to be the case. So everybody may be overwhelmed by the 20th century. I can't, you know, it's, it's, it's amazing how, you know, we're, as we approach or feel that we're approaching some sort of singularity of some kind. Everybody is having to run harder, faster and faster simply to stay in the same place. And, you know, maybe the pace of change will, will reach levels at which not even the United States can, can, can manage it. But if that happens, we'll still be managing more of it than, than a lot of the other societies who just for all kinds of historical, cultural, political reasons, just have had a harder time managing, living with this stuff, living constructively with stuff than we have.
- [28:38]
B
All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers, Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Alex Fitzanov at Hudson and my co host, Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show.