Fareed Zakaria

Trump represents something different

Trump is appealing to the most naked selfishness in people.

He's saying, what's in it for you?

Why aren't we getting more out of this?

You know, that's one of the reasons I think that he is so comfortable with the kind of open corruption that he represents.

Because in a sense, he's saying, look, those guys had a whole system and, you know, it looks very fancy and meritocratic, but they got the spoils.

Now I'm going to get the spoils.

In a way, he's, I think, thinking of himself as representing his people.

But in any case, they seem comfortable with him getting them.

But there is this sense of an appeal to naked selfishness, self-interest, short-term extraction.

And that's, to me, much more worrying.

Because the problem is,

With liberalism not having this answer for the meaning of life, that's an old problem.

And it's a hard one to solve because the whole point of liberalism is that human beings get to decide that and it's not being forced on them.

I think it's, I can't remember who said, but hypocrisy is the homage that vice plays to virtue.

So I think you're getting at something very important.

And I was trying to get at it when saying, if you looked at the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was probably the most advanced Social Democratic Party in Europe in, say, 1905, almost everything that it had on its party platform has now been adopted by every Western country.

So in some ways, what has happened is liberalism has succeeded.

And these societies that have come out of it as a result are wildly successful.

People will often say that, you know, there was a great clash in the 20th century between communism and capitalism and capitalism won.