Fareed Zakaria

That's why people from all over the world have tried desperately to come to America for hundreds of years, because the United States is unusually good at welcoming and accepting.

So there shouldn't have been affirmative action for people of color, whatever that means, or things like that.

And then it goes from being affirmative action to quotas, and then it becomes diversity mandates.

And I feel as though

there should have been some moment of reckoning and saying, wait, have we completely lost track of what the core of liberalism, which was about, as Martin Luther King put it, judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skins.

And those are the kind of things where I think, you know, liberalism gets so institutionalized and conventional wisdom forms and it becomes impossible to course correct.

What I worry about is

You know, kind of romanticism for romanticism's sake.

The people who run around today, they call themselves the principalists because they believe they are adhering to the original ideals and ideas of the 1979 revolution, unlike the terrible pragmatists who have been trying to find a way to compromise with the West.

I think that you are seeing countries around the world find ways to make accommodations around America.

So it's not purely a kind of question of American decline.

It's that we are no longer leading.

So you take something like protectionism.

Yeah, we've become very protectionist.

And what you notice is very interesting.

Other countries regard the United States as, okay, you're the problem we have to deal with, and we'll cut some deal with you because you're too important for us not to.

But outside of that, countries are making more free trade deals with one another.

You know, the Indians with the Europeans, the Europeans with those Latin Americans, the Canadians with... So in other words, the one thing that the U.S.

had going for it was this agenda-setting power.

And that's gone.