CNN’s Fareed Zakaria took his book tour to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday, where he claimed that if there is one thing that unites the “right-wing reactionary movements” of Christian Nationalism (whatever that means), Islamic fundamentalism, and ultra-Orthodox Israelis, it is that belief that “women have gotten to uppity.” For good measure, Zakaria also threw in Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
Colbert asked, “The subtitle for this book is Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. What would you say the main modern backlash we are experiencing right now is?”
Zakaria began by going through the typical talk about globalization and social media before proclaiming that “I would say the principal one has been this one of we've really moved, think about it, you know, we've always through human history had some group has up or down, but women for tens of thousands of years were second-class citizens and that has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. So, think about it, right, 10, 15, 20,000 years of history and then in the last 30 years we upended the basic structure of the family.”
He continued, “Look at the right-wing reactionary movements all over the world, whether it's Islamic fundamentalism, whether it's Christian nationalism, whether it's the ultra-orthodox in Israel, they all, the come of principal concern is often women have gotten too uppity. You know, let’s move, Xi Jinping gave a speech the other day in which he said women basically need to go back to the kitchen and they need to start having babies again.”
Zakaria is hardly alone in using “Christian nationalism” as a scary-sounding term without ever defining it or explaining how it differs from traditionally understood conservative Christianity, but lumping it in with Islamic fundamentalism as “right-wing” and communist dictators strongly suggests Zakaria is just using it to simply mean “bad and scary.”
Earlier in the interview, the Joe Biden fundraiser Colbert mourned, “On your show, Fareed Zakaria GPS, on CNN, you recently covered low approval ratings, which is just below 40 percent right now, 39.3, something like that, despite the economy doing pretty well right now especially compared to other countries.”
He then asked, “looking at the rest of the globe, how does our economy stack against the major industrialized nations right now?”
Zakaria replied with statistics that have nothing to do with Biden, “We are doing much better than any of the other major economies in the world. To give you a simple number, in 2008 the Eurozone, Europe basically, and the U.S. economies were the same size. Today the U.S. economy is twice the size of the Eurozone economy. If Britain were to join the United States as the 51st state, it would be that poorest state in the union, below Mississippi.”
That stat, which is a little more complicated and says more about Britain’s mismanagement than Biden’s supposed successes, left Colbert and his audience in awe. For his part, Zakaria continued in his lamentations, “We are doing amazingly. But what has happened is, people for a while said, 'we don't realize it, we're feeling the inflation.' Well, for the last 18 months, consumer sentiment has been going up, but Biden’s approval ratings still flat lined. What's really happened is our political identities are no longer shaped by economics as it used to be for so many years.”
Zakaria would go on to lament tribalism in politics, which is laughable considering he would soon compare conservatives to Islamists and communists.
Here is a transcript for the March 27 show:
CBS The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
3/28/2024
12:25 AM ET
STEPHEN COLBERT: On your show, Fareed Zakaria GPS, on CNN, you recently covered low approval ratings, which is just below 40 percent right now, 39.3, something like that—
FAREED ZAKARIA: 38, 39, exactly.
COLBERT: -- despite the economy doing pretty well right now especially compared to other countries, looking at the rest of the globe, how does our economy stack against the major industrialized nations right now?
FAREED ZAKARIA: We are doing much better than any of the other major economies in the world. To give you a simple number, in 2008 the Eurozone, Europe basically, and the U.S. economies were the same size. Today the U.S. economy is twice the size of the Eurozone economy.
If Britain were to join the United States as the 51st state, it would be that poorest state in the union, below Mississippi.
COLBERT: Wow.
ZAKARIA: We are doing amazingly. But what has happened is, people for a while said “we don't realize it, we're feeling the inflation.” Well, for the last 18 months, consumer sentiment has been going up, but Biden’s approval ratings still flat lined. What's really happened is our political identities are no longer shaped by economics as it used to be for so many years.
They are shaped by culture, by class, by religion, by all these tribal identities and that was part of the reason I wrote the book because I realize this began with Obama, this-- it used to be the tightest connection in predictive polling, which was your view the economy, president's approval rating always roughly the same. Now, under Obama, the stock market tripled under Obama. His approval ratings didn't move much.
…
COLBERT: You say, the subtitle for this book is "Age of revolutions: Progress and backlash from 1600 to the present." What would you say the main modern backlash we are experiencing right now is?
ZAKARIA: I think it's really all around us, this identity stuff. There’s a backlash against globalization, there’s a backlash against the open information revolution, you know, a lot of people are saying it's too much, social media is, kind of, ruining our lives. But I would say the principal one has been this one of we've really moved, think about it, you know, we've always through human history had some group has up or down, but women for tens of thousands of years were second-class citizens and that has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. So, think about it, right, 10, 15, 20,000 years of history and then in the last 30 years we upended the basic structure of the family.
Well, look at the right-wing reactionary movements all over the world, whether it's Islamic fundamentalism, whether it's Christian nationalism, whether it's the ultra-orthodox in Israel, they all, the come of principal concern is often women have gotten too uppity. You know, let’s move, Xi Jinping gave a speech the other day in which he said women basically need to go back to the kitchen and they need to start having babies again.
