Fareed Zakaria

All that passion that religion and hierarchy came from with the state and the church telling you this is the right thing to do, you know, here are the values.

So there is a moderation.

Romanticism in politics is something to be taken, to be viewed with a certain degree of skepticism.

You're going to go back to the 60s and start some new cult movement.

No, I agree with that.

And I think where I would like to see the radicalism and the kind of reform is when I look at the issue of affirmative action, to me, I was always very uncomfortable with it.

I always thought Lyndon Johnson's explanation of why you needed it to help

formerly enslaved and black people who had then lived under a hundred years of Jim Crow made perfect sense.

But then it starts getting expanded and starts being expanded to all kinds of people, you know, like people like me, which I thought made no sense.

I mean, America has been particularly bad

to African-Americans.

It has been particularly good to other immigrants.

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.