Fareed Zakaria Thinks Steve Bannon Got One Thing Right
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What is the setting and purpose of the live conversation with Fareed Zakaria at Symphony Space?
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On Monday, I joined Fried Sakaria at Symphony Space in New York City for a conversation from a live audience about his 2024 book, Age of Revolutions, which just came out in paperback. Age of Revolutions examines the historical roots for the ongoing rise of far-right populism, but it does so by looking back at other periods in which politics began to topple and fall into upheaval when the thing people thought were possible, the things they knew were true. stopped being true, and new forms of politics became possible. Book, obviously with a lot of relevance to this era. And we even had some audience questions at the end, so I thought I would share it on the feed. Without further ado, here's our conversation.
All right, hello everybody. Thank you for being here tonight. Welcome to Symphony Space. I'm Master Klein, uh columnist and podcast host at the New York Times. And this tonight is going to be a podcast. So I've been reminded to remind you to please silence your phones because it's really hard to edit out. And I'm so thrilled to be here with Freed Zaccaria tonight, the host of Freed Zacaria GPS on CNN and author of the great book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the present. Which came out in paperback on November fourth. Congratulations.
Thank you so much, Ezra. It's a huge pleasure to be here. This is book number one for you. Uh it's I think it's my fifth uh uh so I have an academic dissertation which was published by Princeton University Press and then I have five books after that. So this is the sixth book. But um as a friend of mine says y you never talk about your academic uh dissertation. It's like the the little indie m movie that you made before you went to Hollywood. So so so the one that really represents you.
Exactly. Exactly. Okay. All right, the run of show tonight is we're gonna chat for a while. You, a number of you have kindly submitted questions, which I have chosen with extreme uh discretion and prejudice that I will ask at the end. Um, and we're gonna have a great time. So I wanna begin, Farid, with where you open the book, which is uh one of the more unusual scenes I've imagined. So you open the book around a conversation you Yeah. In Rome. And I gotta say I found this chain very funny. Um Steve Bannon quotes George Soros approvingly to you, saying, We live in revolutionary times. Bannon says he agrees with Soros, and then your whole book is agreeing with Steve Bannon. So what do you all agree
on? I think what we agree on is that something fundamental has changed in the political system. You know, I began to think about this book in 2011, 2012 with the Tea Party. And the reason was that the Tea Party represented something very unusual, a kind of insurgency within the Republican Party. Now remember, most people forget this now, but the Republican Party used to be The state boring hierarchical party that just went along with the party elders doing whatever they were told, right? It used to be the line when when choosing a nominee, you'd say the Democrats fall in love with their presidential nominee, right? Uh Kennedy, Clinton, Obama.
How does Zakaria define the ‘Age of Revolutions’ and why does he think we are living through one now?
The Republicans fall in line. This is a party that five times nominated Richard Nixon for their national. ticket, right? If you add up the number of bushes they've nominated, it's probably another five. So This party is having an internal rebellion, and that rebellion, the more you looked at it, and Teter Scotchpor, as you know, did a wonderful book, she found that the core concerns of the Tea Party were not what the Republican Party used to be about, which is economics and balancing budgets and cutting deficits.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the setting and purpose of the live conversation with Fareed Zakaria at Symphony Space?
0:00–4:41
2
How does Zakaria define the ‘Age of Revolutions’ and why does he think we are living through one now?
4:41–11:39
3
What role did the Tea Party play in reshaping the Republican Party’s identity?
11:39–26:40
4
Why does Zakaria argue that politics has moved from economic to cultural (open‑versus‑closed) fault lines?
26:40–41:52
5
How do recent wealth‑inequality statistics illustrate the new political landscape?
41:52–46:19
6
How can the Democratic/center‑left parties rebuild trust with working‑class and immigrant voters?
46:19–54:33
7
What is the connection between identity politics, immigration, and the rise of right‑wing populism?
54:33–1:09:22
8
What ideas emerge from the audience Q&A about a populist left and future political leadership?
1:09:22–1:10:20