Dr Fareed Zakaria, on the new world disorder
The last time I spoke at the Rotary Club of Bombay was when I was in the 10th standard at Cathedral. I won the Rotary Club Award for something or the other. I cannot remember what it was. The function was held in the Crystal Room. I remember being extremely nervous. I was asked to speak for about three minutes, and then they went on to the next awardee. So I’m very grateful to be invited again and given a little bit more time to explain my thoughts. It’s a huge pleasure to be here. The Rotary Club of Bombay is, of course, something I grew up with. It was involved in helping students, even in those days, in various ways. And I think of it extremely fondly. Many, many of my parents’ best friends were Rotarians. And in fact, I am doing this as a favour to Farhat Jamal, who is a great, great friend and has done an extraordinary act of public service by taking on all the charitable institutions that my parents had founded in Aurangabad, which now amount to about 14 colleges, with about 15,000 students. Farhat, after having a very successful career in the private sector, is now the chairman of those trusts. And in order to make sure, as all of you know in India, that the trusts stay not just efficient and competent but honest, Suhail Dathrani is our lawyer and has been an invaluable assistant. He’s vice-chairman of the trust. So you can see why I am here, but I’m also here because it’s a huge pleasure to have an opportunity. And if I had known Deepak Parekh was going to be in the audience, I would have accepted in advance.
Look, I know what you’re all thinking about, so why don’t we get right to the main topic that I’m sure you’re wondering about, which is: what the hell happened in America?
I think that the best way to try to understand it is to step back for a moment and recognise that in the last year, every incumbent government of every major industrial democracy in the world went to the polls, and almost all, as it turns out, lost. The British Conservative Party went from having the largest majority it had under Margaret Thatcher, since Margaret Thatcher—so 40 years—to the smallest minority it has ever had in its 200-year history as a party.
The government of Emmanuel Macron’s party in the parliamentary elections was essentially destroyed. It’s down to 90 seats or something like that out of 400. The South Korean government—the opposition won.
In Japan, the LDP, which has run Japan since 1948 with a nine-month exception, is the longest-serving ruling party in the world, lost the parliamentary elections. So in a sense, we are witnessing what one might almost think of as the second COVID election, meaning that all the consequences of COVID—the disruption, the supply chains, the inflation, the sense of uncertainty—all in a sense cost incumbents. And there was a kind of incumbent penalty no matter where you look. Even in places that haven’t had elections, like Canada, Justin Trudeau is at the lowest approval rating he has ever had and is the lowest approval rating any Canadian government has had in 50 years.
So the reality is everyone has faced an incumbency penalty. And in that context, the Biden-Harris administration also suffered. If you look at the scale of the defeat in other places, Kamala Harris doesn’t look as bad, frankly. She lost by about 1.5% of the popular vote, of the national vote, which, if you consider the trends I was describing, is not actually as severe as many of the other countries involved. India, of course, stands out as something of an exception here in the sense that while Narendra Modi faced an incumbent penalty—massively reduced number of seats in parliament, lost an outright majority—he still was able to stay in power. And I’ll get back to why I think that was. But if you look at the American election, the most interesting aspect of it is the degree to which you are now seeing a complete realignment of the American electorate. So the simplest way I can explain this to you is to point out that in 1996, Bill Clinton won the non-college-educated vote in America. In other words, the blue-collar working-class vote, by 14 points. In 2024, Donald Trump won the non-college-educated vote by 14 points. In other words, the Democratic Party, which used to be the party of the working class, the blue-collar workers, has now become the party of the affluent, the professionals, those with college degrees, those working in industries like consulting, banking, law, accounting, and software. And the Republican Party, which used to be the party of the upper middle-class professionals, is now the party of the working class under Donald Trump. The two parties have flipped their socioeconomic bases, but the elections remain as tight as ever, just flipped over.
If you think back 25 years ago, in the 2000 election, the Republicans won by 536 votes in Florida. Every national popular vote tally is within one or two points of each other, with the one exception of Obama’s 2008 victory, which was a combination of Obama’s charisma and the global financial crisis, which caused a shattering of the old Republican Party. So what you’re watching is something very interesting and fascinating happening in the Western world, which is a breakdown of the old political system itself. If you looked at the 20th century, it was very easy to figure out politically what the spectrum was. It was left versus right, largely about the state’s role in the economy. If you were left of centre, you wanted more state, more regulation, more taxes, more redistribution. If you were right of centre, you wanted less state, less taxation, less redistribution. And that was true almost everywhere in the world. If you look, even in India, where we had a slightly different political spectrum, broadly speaking, that would have been the way in which you would have described the spectrum. If you went to Brazil, that was broadly the way you would have described the system. And that left versus right, with economy as the central dimension, persisted for a long time, as I say, for almost all the 20th century. But after the Cold War, you began to see a shift in the way in which politics was organised. And you started to see the rise of other issues—social issues, cultural issues. And suddenly you started to see that people’s political identities were defined more by these issues of social class rather than economic class.
What do I mean by that? The central divide in America right now—the single strongest predictor of how you vote—is not how much money you make. It is whether you have a college degree or not. It is a symbol of your social class. To make it clear, what I mean by that is I would be able to better predict who you’re going to vote for based on whether you have a college education because a high school teacher with an advanced professional degree living in Brooklyn, making $60,000 a year, is going to vote left of centre. And a blue-collar plumber living in Queens, making $150,000 a year, is going to vote right of centre. A multimillionaire software developer is going to work left of centre, but you will find a very religious trucker who drives trucks for a living is going to vote right of centre. So what you’re seeing is that the central division is actually around something less tangible than economics.
So if you look at the prediction, what predicts your vote in the United States? First is, of course, party affiliation, but number two is college. Number three is: do you live in an urban area or a rural area? Number four is: are you religious or irreligious? And these divisions stack on top of each other. So you have almost ended up in the United States with two Americas—one urban, multicultural, cosmopolitan, secular, and educated; the other rural, white, less educated, and more religious. And that almost tribal difference has been what has defined American politics for the last decade or two. The 2024 election saw one more twist to this, which is that, for the first time, the Republican Party got a share—a significant share—of some non-white working-class vote. Not so many blacks, but Hispanics and some Asians. And so you’re beginning to see almost the coalescence of two different groups where the old categories of economy and race are giving way to the new categories of social status, religion, and gender. So overwhelmingly, men voted for the Republican Party. Women voted for the Democratic Party. These are the new dividing lines of politics. And, by the way, this is, broadly speaking, happening in Europe as well.
So why is all this happening? It’s happening fundamentally because we have been living in an age—I write about this in my new book—in a highly revolutionary age in which there is an enormous amount of churn and turmoil associated with people’s lives. And that churn and turmoil is producing a backlash. And we are living through that backlash. So think about what the world has looked like from the mid-1980s to now. In the mid-1980s, you had a stable Cold War in which lots of countries were capitalist, democratic. A lot of countries were communist, non-democratic. And in 1989, that paradigm cracked and broke. And you began a new world, which is characterised by enormous revolutionary change in economics, in technology, in politics, and in culture. What do I mean? In 1985, if you looked at the world, you would have said most of the planet was being run along quasi-socialist lines in undemocratic ways. So you look at Latin America: all of Latin America was military juntas with high protectionist walls, tariffs, barriers, and non-convertible currencies. By 1995, all of Latin America, except Cuba, were democracies with, broadly speaking, free market and free trade policies. In 1985, if you had looked at most of Asia, it would have, broadly speaking, been in the same pattern. And by 1995, while you hadn’t seen democracy break out everywhere, countries like India and China had very aggressively moved towards a free-market, free-trade orientation. This was also true of Indonesia, Malaysia, and even places like Vietnam.
So you were seeing the democratisation of politics, the liberalisation of trade, and the marketisation of the economy. Then you saw the explosion of the information revolution, which connected and opened up the world. All of these trends, in a sense, reinforced one another. The more you had marketisation, the more you had free trade, the more you had liberalisation, the more democracies there were. And it seemed as though this was the natural expression of human aspirations all over the world.
And then what you start to see is the backlash. And the backlash takes many, many forms. Some of it is a backlash against the marketisation, free trade, and liberalisation that comes to fruition, particularly around the global financial crisis. When people say, “Wait a minute, this system is chaotic, it’s out of control, and by the way, it’s very unfair. Look at who got bailed out and who didn’t get bailed out.” So there was a kind of crisis where the legitimacy of that economic revolution was fundamentally questioned. Think about the degree to which you start to see democracies experience trouble and “strongmen” come in and say, “I have the answer. I’m going to find a way to run this country with greater speed, clarity, and purpose.” Some of them are outright dictators; others, like Erdoğan in Turkey or Orbán in Hungary, are “strongmen” who are able to manipulate the democratic system and dominate it.
If you look at American power, which in a way undergirded this entire system, American power begins to get questioned with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and then the rise of China and the return of Russia to the world stage. So you start to see that we are now in a world of resistance and backlash to these extraordinary revolutionary trends that have been running through the system. And there is also a cultural element to this, which is very important—these trends also have the effect of creating a kind of cultural revolution. This has always been the case: when economics changes, when technology changes, people’s conceptions of themselves change. And so you saw it across the world: a much greater churn in society, where women were rising to positions of power and prominence, and minorities were rising. And the minorities were of a variety of types—ethnic minorities, racial minorities, gender minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals. If you put it all together, and you picture a traditional family in the Midwest in a steel town in Ohio, and they’re looking at what has happened to their world, they look at it and say, “My world has been upended.
Globalisation means that the factory that I used to go to and work at every day is now in South Korea. The second job that I wanted to get, I got the job, but it’s a gig economy job; it’s a part-time job because most of the work is now being done by software and technology.” And it’s not just about money, because the United States’ per capita GDP continues to rise extraordinarily. Median incomes continue to go up steadily. The labour market is very tight. The US has the lowest unemployment rate in 40 or 50 years. But that person’s world has disappeared, because along with that steel factory was a community. And that community would go to church every Sunday. And that practice starts to wane. And that community would go to the cinema every Saturday, but the cinema has shut down because of Netflix and all these streaming services. They used to meet at a bowling alley, but now everyone stays at home and plays video games. They used to go to the hardware store, but Home Depot has taken the place of the hardware store. And in more educated communities, there would be a bookshop. But Amazon is now everyone’s bookshop. So you see how you’ve taken somebody, and you’ve taken their world away. And then they look at it and they say to themselves, “Why is all this happening?” It’s very difficult to explain abstract forces like the movement of capital, the movement of goods and services, the acceleration of software, and the degree to which software produces the value-add and has therefore lowered the importance of brawn work and raised the importance of brain work. But what you can see is there are a lot of people coming into the country, and they look different. And they sound different. And they worship different gods. And so your focus starts to be on the visible manifestation of all these changes—immigration, right? And you start to say, “This is what the problem is. It’s these people.” It’s much easier to put your finger on a human face, a human being, rather than these abstract forces that I was describing. And that has become the reality in every Western country.
In every Western country, the rocket fuel propelling right-wing populism is immigration. If you think about it, I know people talk a lot about inequality. And of course, some of that is true. But you will notice the rise of very strident right-wing populist parties in Scandinavia. Sweden is not a place known for its income inequality. Sweden is one of the most egalitarian advanced industrial societies in the world. But it now has the second-largest party in Sweden—a right-wing populist party that is deeply anti-immigrant. The Netherlands now has its largest party—a right-wing populist party that is deeply anti-immigrant. The party polling first in France right now, and which won the French parliamentary elections, is Marine Le Pen’s party, a right-wing anti-immigrant party. And you can go on down the line and see them.
And by the way, if you, as a social science experiment, want to ask yourself, “How can you be sure of this?” Well, there is one advanced industrial society in the world that has all the problems afflicting advanced industrial societies—of course, the economy, technology, all these things—but it doesn’t have any right-wing populism. And you may ask yourself, “What country is that?” The answer is Japan. And why is that? Because Japan doesn’t take any immigrants, right? No immigrants, no right-wing populism.
And so that reality of a Western world roiled by all these forces, but with one in particular becoming the face of globalisation, technological change, and social-cultural change, has become a kind of master narrative explaining this rise. But there is, in a sense, a broader backlash against this world that was created over the last 30 years. And not just the world—the elite.
I know I’m now speaking as a member of that elite to members of that elite because, over these last 30 years, you saw the rise of a highly capable, qualified, meritocratic, technocratic elite that did very well in this new world. This phenomenon exists everywhere. Fifty years ago, even in the United States, how did you get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton? Well, you had to have gone to the right school.
How did you go to the right school? You had to have been born into the right family, which meant you had to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. If you look back, every senator, college president, and CEO came from that mould. Then it began to change because universities, which are the great sorting mechanisms, said, “No, we’re going to start taking people on the basis of merit. We’re going to administer something called the SATs.”
And that began transforming the elite of society—from an elite based on bloodlines and birth, and in India caste, to a more meritocratic one. That is the rise of this very powerful elite all over the world. But what happened is, in doing that, we all forgot about the people who don’t do well on those tests, who don’t live in those cities, who don’t have that capacity.
The post-industrial economy massively rewards brain power and does not particularly reward brawn power. If you manipulate symbols for a living—computer code, language, images, numbers—you are doing very well in this world. That describes every single person at this table, in this room. You are a symbolic analyst of some kind or another.
If you manipulate physical objects for a living, your labour has no pricing power in today’s world. That distinction has caused deep resentment and anger. If you look at the elections of the last five to seven years, there is one simpler way to describe them than I just did: it’s all anti-establishment.
It’s all against the elite. It’s a way of saying, “I protest this world that we are in, and this division.” The two politicians who have dominated the United States over the last 20 years are Barack Obama and Donald Trump. They are very different figures, except they have one thing in common: they are both outsiders.
That reality is fuelling the anger and dissatisfaction. That is part of the challenge facing every society as we move forward because it’s very hard to figure out what would be another way of constructing an elite, if not using some kind of meritocracy, if not having some kind of merit-based requirements.
What do we do? Do we go back to the old system and say the Brahmins will run everything? Or do we decide to organise things by random lottery? It’s not clear how this could be resolved. So, there is going to be this tension, and I think it will continue to develop.
A final point before we open up to questions: there are some leaders who are particularly good at managing these forces. Trump is good. He’s not, frankly, fantastic at it. He’s very good at certain aspects. He can attract fanatical devotion from the working-class base of the new Republican Party. However, he also offends many people and turns them off. While Trump has a very high floor—about 40% of Americans support him no matter what—he also has a low ceiling, having never crossed 47% in terms of approval ratings.
There are others who are more skilled at channelling this rage while still appealing to enough people in the middle. This would describe someone like Erdogan in Turkey or Modi in India.
Modi has been particularly adept at being both something of an outsider and something of an insider. In many ways, he is fundamentally an outsider. He is the first Indian prime minister truly outside the traditional elite circles. It’s not just that he came from a very poor background—Manmohan Singh also came from a very poor background. But Manmohan Singh entered the elite class through education, earning a PhD in economics from Cambridge and similar achievements. Modi never did. Modi was, and remains, an outsider.
As a result, he has that “street cred” that very few others possess. Yet, at the same time, he has appealed to an aspirational segment of India that wants the nation to forge ahead and be competent on the world stage. It’s a very clever balancing act, allowing him to be both an insider and an outsider.
This is an especially difficult feat when you’ve been prime minister for 10 years, yet Modi has managed it. As a result, we are living in an age where those who can navigate these trends—successfully portraying themselves as insiders and outsiders simultaneously—seem to perform best.
As we move forward, I believe societies will attempt to manage this backlash without derailing themselves. At the end of the day, progress is impossible in the midst of a backlash. You can’t turn back the clock. Nostalgia is not a political ideology—certainly not one that works.
Therefore, we all have to find a way to move forward while recognising that there is significant turmoil. It produces enormous uncertainty and leaves people feeling profoundly disoriented. Yet, progress is the only path forward.
Thank you all very much.
ROTARIANS ASK
Elon Musk came to India, then went to China and decided to invest there. What is your reading of why he did that, or what advice would you give the government here to tilt the balance in India’s favour?
I think Musk was essentially playing India. I believe he always intended to get into China. From his perspective, China is a much larger market and the only one capable of justifying Tesla’s staggering market capitalisation and valuation. Remember, Tesla’s current market cap is larger than that of every car company in the world combined. This implies that the market is essentially betting Tesla will become the only car company in the world, which is not true.
Musk likely recognised that he needed access to the two largest car markets globally—the US and China. The Chinese were probably giving him a tough time, so he pivoted to India to catch their attention, which seemingly worked.
My view is that India’s progress should not depend on pandering to Elon Musk or any individual. What India needs are broader reforms that benefit everyone—reforms that level the playing field, encourage widespread opportunity, and focus on investments in education.
Take, for example, India’s recent subsidy to Micron Technology for semiconductor manufacturing. India, with a per capita GDP of $2,700, is not at a stage where advanced chip manufacturing is typically undertaken. The subsidy to Micron is approximately one-and-a-half times the size of India’s total education budget—for just one company. Imagine if, instead of giving that subsidy to Micron, India had doubled its education budget and the number of schools nationwide.
India’s path to growth should focus on opening up the private sector, reducing tariffs, and creating a more globalised economy. India is currently the most protectionist large economy in the world. This is problematic because much of modern manufacturing is based on assembly, which requires significant imports of intermediate goods. High tariffs in India make importing these goods difficult, hindering its potential as a global manufacturing hub.
Allowing easier imports, encouraging domestic manufacturing, and heavily investing in workforce education and skills training would be a far stronger growth strategy than catering to a handful of global corporations. Take the Apple deal, for instance. While I broadly support it, the government made numerous special concessions for Apple. Instead, concessions should be universal, creating a business environment where everyone benefits from a more relaxed regulatory framework and improved ease of doing business.
We are in an era where business is becoming increasingly politicised—not just in India but globally. For instance, Tesla’s stock price rose by 30% two days after Trump won the US presidential election. This wasn’t because of any immediate economic changes. In fact, Trump was arguably less supportive of green technologies than his opponent, Kamala Harris, would have been. The rise was based on the perception that proximity to political power is advantageous for business.
India should move away from this model and focus on the fundamentals—education, skill development, infrastructure, and an equitable business environment.
You mentioned leaders who successfully manoeuvre between being insiders and outsiders—such as Erdogan, Orban, Modi, and Trump. Why have the ones who manage this so effectively all been illiberal autocrats?
That’s an excellent question. I think these leaders tap into the anger and frustration people feel towards the system. As I mentioned earlier, this discontent is deeply anti-institutional. It comes from those who feel left behind and view the world as heading in a direction they dislike.
They direct their frustration towards institutions—political parties, governments, and even democracy itself—viewing them as flawed or corrupt. For instance, Trump’s rise during the 2015-2016 Republican primaries was unique in that he primarily attacked his own party rather than the Democrats. He criticised figures like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, blamed Bush for the Iraq War, and even suggested that the global financial crisis was his fault.
This anti-institutional rage is inherently illiberal. Democracy relies on institutions—free speech, fair elections, and systems that do not prescribe specific outcomes. Liberal democracy is built on these principles. However, when people feel deeply disenchanted, they often channel their anger at these very institutions, and leaders like Erdogan, Orban, Modi, and Trump are adept at exploiting this sentiment.
These leaders thrive by embodying the frustration and mistrust people feel towards established systems, presenting themselves as alternatives. However, this raises a fundamental challenge: if democracy is about strengthening institutions and ensuring fairness, how do societies reconcile this with the growing backlash against these structures?
With respect to the choices Trump initially made for his cabinet, there has been a lot of criticism. What do you think this means for what he has in mind for the next four years, and do you agree with some of those choices?
It’s actually a very good follow-up to the question that was just asked because, if you think about it, these are people who are promising to overhaul the institutions they have been given charge of. They are essentially bringing a wrecking ball to these ministries and rights. So, again, the whole idea is, “We hate the Department of Justice as it exists. We hate the Department of Defence as it exists. We hate them.” Now, what they’re going to find is that it’s very easy to say this. It’s very easy to use all this rhetoric. Then you go in and discover these are very large, complex institutions, and it’s not going to be that easy to change. Let me give you one example. Even what I think is a very good impulse on the part of Trump is the Department of Government Efficiency, which is not actually a government department. It’s going to have to be some kind of NGO that works in coordination with the government. By the way, it’s amusing to have a Department of Government Efficiency that has two people heading it, rather than one, which seems a bit counterproductive. It’s not exactly the most efficient way to run a committee. But they say Musk will take two trillion dollars out of the budget. The federal budget is about six and a half trillion dollars. About 40% of that is mandatory entitlement spending—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid—you have no control over that. Another billion dollars, roughly, is for the Defence Department and Veterans Affairs. Another 800 million or roughly a billion goes to interest on the debt. What you’re left with is 30% of the budget. So, of the six trillion, you essentially have two trillion that you can play with. To get two trillion dollars out of the budget would be to literally shut down the entire government of the United States. So, obviously, it’s not going to happen. Now you face the reality of, “Okay, how do you actually take these grand ideas?” What you’ll find is a lot more rhetoric about transformation, disruption, and change. What you’ll see is some more high-profile stuff, but much less substantive stuff. Let me give you another example. Trump says he’s going to deport 24 million people. The United States has, as I said, the lowest unemployment rate it has had in 50 years—4% unemployment. You deport, forget 24 million people, you deport 10 million people, and wages are going to skyrocket, right? The remaining people will charge more, and you’ll have inflation on a scale that will make the last few years look like child’s play. That’s not going to happen. What they’ll do is selectively and symbolically engage in some very brutal deportations. So, it’ll be kind of made-for-TV deportations. I think there’ll be a lot of gimmickry around this. It’s much easier said than done to claim you’re going to transform the government in one fell swoop.
There’s so much happening today globally, and I believe the media has such an important role to play. I just wanted to ask how you feel about certain accusations—asked in good faith—of bias in the Western media, particularly following the example of the Indian media, where certain conflicts or situations, such as in Gaza, are often accused of unfairly reporting one side’s narrative unquestioningly while hiding the other. For example, there was the incident where Nick Robertson showed a calendar in a hospital stating it was a list of Hamas terrorists. How do you feel about that, and how do you think the Western media is addressing these accusations of bias?
It’s a good question, and you actually use a good example. Because on Gaza, certainly CNN is literally 50% of the time accused of being pro-Palestinian and 50% of the time of being pro-Israeli. Broadly speaking, in America, we are regarded as pro-Palestinian. Outside of America, we are regarded as pro-Israeli. It’s the same report—literally the same news report. We get 7,000 emails from outside America saying, “I can’t believe you showed this, you’re Israeli stooges.” And in the United States, we get, on the same report, 7,000 emails saying, “I can’t believe you did this, you hate Israel, you’re pro-Palestinian, you’re pro-Hamas.” Look, the reality of media bias is that reporters are human beings. And it’s probably true that most reporters are left of centre. Why is that? Think about what I just said about the college divide. Most reporters have college degrees. It’s the same reason why, when you look at the political contributions of the software industry, they’re overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party. So, yes, they’re all human beings. They’re part of the sociological trends I’ve described. But I don’t think media organisations like The New York Times or CNN are intentionally engaging in ideological bias, trying to deliberately hide certain perspectives. What happens is, you as a human being react to something with greater shock and horror when you’re looking at the world through a certain prism. Let me give you a simple example: Most journalists in America are pro-choice, meaning they believe the decision about abortion should be left to a woman. When they report stories, they tend to reflect that. So, when a state shuts down that choice, they will probably do more human-interest stories about that and about the difficulties poor women face in accessing abortions. They’re not looking at it from a Christian theological point of view that says life begins at conception and every abortion kills a human soul. I think that’s a fair point—that there is a human dimension to all this. But I think there’s a distinction between media organisations like CNN and The New York Times and an outright political organisation like Fox News, which is, in effect, an instrument of the Republican Party. You can see this by the fact that three Fox anchors have been appointed to Trump’s cabinet. Far be it from me—who was an anchor of a weekend show on television—to say that an anchor of a weekend show isn’t qualified to hold the highest offices in the land. But that tells you something. Those people fundamentally think of themselves first as conservative warriors and second as journalists. That distinction, I think, sometimes gets lost.
How many countries are there in the world that allow a convicted felon to stand for election, let alone be the head of state?
Well, it’s one of the glories of the American system, I suppose. If you are a convicted felon and the public loves you and thinks you should be mayor of New Orleans, for example, you can become that. In fact, there was once a mayor of New Orleans who ran the city from his jail cell. But I do think, incidentally, one of the things that has actually helped Trump is all these lawsuits against him. People forget that Trump was doing very badly after January 6th, 2021, after the midterm elections in which the Republicans got hammered. His approval rating was down to 31%, the lowest it had ever been. Then a series of Democratic, left-leaning prosecutors in various places began indicting him. And guess what happened? His approval rating started going up. Why? Because what does this base believe? Think about what we’ve been discussing: They believe there’s a group of urban, over-educated liberals who hate them, look down on them, and use all kinds of fancy manoeuvres to keep them down. So what happened? A bunch of urban, over-educated lawyers used a bunch of fancy manoeuvres to try to take Trump off the playing field. And they resented it. They felt that Trump went from being a loser to being a victim. You have to be very careful because the thing about Anglo-Saxon law, Anglo-American law, is you are meant to follow the procedure of saying, first, you find a crime, then you find the person who committed the crime. You don’t first find the person and ask, “Has he committed a crime?” None of us is perfect. Trust me, if you had a special prosecutor look into your life, I know that if they looked into mine, I’d probably have violated some laws. But that’s not the Anglo-American way. The point is, first the crime, then the criminal—not first the criminal, then the crime.
I think there’s a lot of talk about a lot of young men voting for Trump this time. I went to Ivy League schools, and it’s the first time I have seen so many educated college men, including members of my family, the so-called elite, voting for Trump. I think the words used for the other side were like, they were unclear, they were weak; it wasn’t, you know, presenting a lot of American strength. So what do you make of that? I mean, he was able to reach over to the other side and gain a lot of credible voters in New York and Boston. Is that also sort of a new trend?
So I think there are two things going on. One, the Republicans were able to exploit a certain Democratic overreach on some of these areas. Trump is politically a very savvy character. When he did that thing at the Republican National Convention, where he had Hulk Hogan come on stage and tear off his shirt, I think most of us looked at that and thought, “This guy is nuts. What is this, Tamasha?” Right? But it turned out that it was a very clever way to appeal to non-college-educated men, particularly Hispanic men and Black men, who looked at the Democratic Party and heard all this talk of unisex bathrooms and transgender sports. Then they looked at the Republican Party and saw Hulk Hogan. And they thought, “You know, I’m more at home at this party.” It’s a very subliminal signal, and I think it was very effective.
The broader point I would make is the backlash I haven’t talked about yet: the backlash to the emancipation of women. I think it’s a very real one. If you think about how deep a change this has been in society—think about it: for all of human history, women have been second-class citizens, and it’s only in the last 50 years, and really in the last 30 years, that this has changed. I think it’s caused an enormous amount of unease and, in some cases, resentment. And men don’t know how to express it, because they know it’s not politically correct to do so. So I think it gets expressed in various ways that we’re seeing.
And it’s not just by men. My mother worked all her life, and you can imagine being a working woman in India in the 1960s and 70s. She always said that non-working women have a very complicated attitude towards working women because for a non-working woman, a working woman is a kind of symbolic rejection of your life choices. It’s almost as though it’s saying you’ve done the wrong thing—you should have been working, you should have been out there. And a resentment forms.
So, there’s a certain way in which they’re affirming, saying, “You know, damn it, I made the right choices.” It’s a very complicated thing because it’s such a deep social change. You’ve taken the basic unit of the family and changed the power dynamic, which was deeply hierarchical, to something more egalitarian. And that’s a big change in society. I think we’re still digesting it. Honestly, this is an area where India has a long way to go. I just saw this stunning statistic that India now has a lower female participation in the workforce than Saudi Arabia. Not because India dropped, by the way, but because Saudi Arabia has increased it in the last few years due to all the reforms that have taken place. That strikes me as not only a bad social point of view but a great missed opportunity economically. I mean, you’ve got this incredibly talented 50% of the population that is not being fully used in the economy.
Sir, Mrs Clinton and Mrs Harris both lost elections in the last eight years. Do you think America is not ready to have a woman president?
Yeah, think of what I just said now. And if I can give you one piece of data to confirm that: Joe Biden got a larger share of the women’s vote than either Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris. What does that tell you?
So when is America going to be ready?
That’s as good a guess as mine. It’s a very strange thing, by the way, because in India, we had one a long time ago, but my mother’s view is always that in India, people are comfortable with the ruler. Indira Gandhi is Durga. You can worship her, fear her. The wife has to stay in the background, cooking in the kitchen… There’s a very strange dynamic where you’re okay with the distant, powerful female figure, but not with the one you live with at home.
The most common and popular discussion at cocktail parties in Bombay is very simple. Everyone is asking, “Is Trump good for India or bad for India?” And particularly the announcement of the Secretary of the Treasury, who is the senior H1 manager with George Soros. We all know what George Soros has been, and he’s totally anti-India, he and his son. So, what is your opinion—is Trump good for India or bad?
I think he’s basically good for India because Trump is very anti-China, and the team is broadly speaking anti-China. In that context, the truth is, this is one area where the administration hasn’t mattered. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has pursued a completely consistent policy of accelerating cooperation with India. Think about how Bill Clinton began it, George Bush then accelerated it with nuclear development, Obama continued it, saying that the man he admires most in the world is Manmohan Singh, and then Trump and Modi become “Howdy Modi” and all that stuff, right? And Biden has continued the cooperation with the Indo-Pacific and AUKUS and all that. So, while we like to focus on these personalities, I think broadly speaking, US-India relations are very strong and will continue to get closer. Frankly, this is an area where the leaders are behind the people. India is now—I think it’s either the number one most pro-American country in the world or the number two, after Israel. It varies from poll to poll. And the politicians are catching up with that reality.
There’s one issue, Deepak, which is the tariffs. India is, as I said, very protectionist. But frankly, a little tough love from America would be a good thing for India. If you have to work out a bilateral deal where the Indians have to lower some tariffs to appease Trump, it’s good for India. It’s good for India to have that competition.
You are a student of history and politics around the world. Do you think Elon Musk played a critical role in this election, or would Trump have won even without him?
It’s a very good question. I think that Musk played a role in a broader sense than just this specific $175 million he spent. The one thing that’s interesting about this election is money didn’t make a difference because Kamala Harris spent $1.5 billion in, what, six or seven months? What I think mattered, and this is, again, where the Democrats screwed up, is that Musk is a very powerful figure in the American imagination—and frankly, in the global imagination. He’s an incredible technological genius, and he represents a kind of future, aspirational, forward movement. The Democrats should have captured that.
If you think about who was the party of the future in the 1990s, it was Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. Who was the party of the future in the 2010s? It was Barack Obama’s party, and he was closely allied with all those great technologists of the time, from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg. The Democrats, because they had been trying to figure out how to get back the working class, decided to beat up on these technology whiz kids. But that’s the future. That’s the aspirational one.
I think part of why they lost some young men is because there’s a certain kind of energy that Musk represented. And when you turn that off, and when you say you don’t like that, you’re telling a lot of young people—and honestly, young men—that we don’t like alpha men, we don’t like ambition, we don’t like energy, we don’t like that kind of aspiration. That’s a bad place to be. Americans, generally speaking, vote for the person who feels like they have that aspirational future orientation. Think of John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama—that’s what you want to tie yourself to. By making Musk an enemy, I think they made a mistake in that broader sense, beyond whether or not he spent the money well or poorly in Pennsylvania.