Fareed Zakaria

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.

But actually, the political scientist Sherry Berman makes this point very well.

What actually won at the end was social democracy, was a mixture of the welfare state and capitalism everywhere, even including the United States.

We have a vast welfare state.

And so once you have created that, once the basic conditions of creating a middle-class democratic society in which there are protections for the poor, for the unemployed, you know, there is healthcare of some kind,

Where do you go?

And part of what happened is I think the left in some areas went too far left and in an illiberal fashion, you know, the emphasis on quotas and DEI and all that kind of thing.

In other areas, they decided they wanted to go even further left, right?

So the challenge is I see the problem with saying, okay, you know, we've arrived at this stage and a lot of people, I have to confess, like me thought,