Fareed Zakaria is the ultimate Serious Person, invited by other Serious People to attend Serious Conferences and give Serious Speeches for Serious Amounts of Money.
Zakaria is also a documented plagiarist, a dull writer and a pundit who, like most other Serious People, was colossally wrong on Iraq and Libya.
None of these transgressions matter, though, because once one is a Serious Person, no amount of being wrong can oust one from the Serious Person Club. And one of the more urgent tasks for the club of late is lumping Sanders and Trump together in an effort to discredit the former and apologize for the latter. Thursday in the Washington Post (6/30/16), Zakaria attempted to do just that:
The Obvious Trump Running Mate? Bernie Sanders, of Course
Yes, this is Zakaria’s plan. Sanders should run alongside someone who opposes virtually everything he stands for because on the surface, they have similar criticisms of trade agreements. Ignore climate change, immigration, reproductive rights, civil rights and dozens of other radically different positions. This proposition, presented without any apparent irony, is either made in total bad faith by Zakaria, or else he hit his head on a TED talk lighting fixture.
The piece begins with the claim that Clinton would continue Obama’s trade policies.
Republican leaders such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan have explained that their core rationale in supporting Donald Trump is that only he can ensure the success of conservative, free-market ideas. The alternative, Ryan notes, is Hillary Clinton, who would simply continue Barack Obama’s policies.
This is an assertion of faith, since Clinton has come out against the Trans Pacific Partnership, Obama’s signature trade deal. Zakaria may assume Clinton is lying when she says she changed her mind on this, but he provides no evidence for this supposition.
Zakaria’s next assertion, though, is an outright falsehood:
On these trade matters, US manufacturing, and now Brexit, Trump’s positions are largely indistinguishable from Sanders’.
It’s a subtle but potent lie. Sanders, unlike Trump, has long been opposed to Britain leaving the European Union. How can Zakaria casually claim two opposing positions are “largely indistinguishable”? How could the editors at Washington Post allow such a blatant falsehood to reach print?
And it’s not an inconsequential one, either. If Brexit wreaks the havoc on the UK economy many are predicting, Washington Post’s millions of readers thinking Sanders supported such a measure would go a long way toward damaging both his credibility and that of the broader progressive movement.
The piece, of course, is not really about Sanders or Trump. It’s clear the framing is a gimmick to hook the reader into hearing Zakaria’s boilerplate cheerleading for “free trade” while continuing the long tradition of lazy pundits lumping Sanders and Trump into the same ideological space.
On free trade Zakaria, again, misleads. He writes:
Manufacturing as a share of all US jobs has been declining for 70 years, as part of a transition experienced by every advanced industrial economy.
It’s true that as the economy got larger, manufacturing jobs represented a declining share of all employment–but the absolute number of manufacturing jobs held more or less steady from the late 1960s through the 1990s, at about 17 million. Then in the wake of Bill Clinton’s trade deals, the trade deficit exploded, reaching $827 billion in 2006, and the actual number of manufacturing jobs plummeted, to about 12.5 million. This did not happen in every advanced industrial economy; it happened to the US, because of choices its government made (FAIR.org, 8/19/15). (Economist Dean Baker takes Zakaria to task on this point: Beat the Press, 7/1/16.)
Zakaria went on to say:
Over the past 50 years, the countries that have grown the most are those that have opened themselves up to global markets.
This is an article of neoliberal faith, but it just isn’t true. China, for instance, has had a GDP growth rate of 10.9 percent annually over the past 50 years (based on World Bank figures), but does not have a particularly “open economy”; the International Chamber of Commerce puts it in 59th place out of 75 countries in its Open Market Index. Pakistan and Bangladesh–72nd and 73rd on the ICC’s list–grew by 8.0 and 7.2 percent per year, respectively. India–which Zakaria singles out as a country kept “poor and stagnant” because it “followed economic policies premised on the idea that free trade was disastrous”–has had annual growth of 7.4 percent from 1964 to 2014.
For neoliberal high priests like Zakaria, maintaining the ideological order on free trade is of the utmost importance. To do this, it’s essential they hammer home the myth that “populist” candidates of left and right are simply two sides of the same ignorant, irrational coin.
Meanwhile, calm, scholarly, Serious People like Zakaria will come in and explain why the centrist corporate orthodoxy is the one true faith. That they have to spread falsehoods and half-truths to do so is a testament to how tenuous their position has become.
Correction: An earlier version of this post conflated balance of trade with balance of payments.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. Follow them on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC and @JNaureckas.
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Well, Sanders may have not taken the position Zakaria claims, but unfortunately, Sanders-supporters have – and they are increasingly becoming difficult to distinguish from Trump supporters in their rabid, over-the-top misogynistic hatred of Clinton (“Killary” “Red Queen” “Murderous B-tch”, among other epithets), their declarations of “never Hillary”, their total absence of criticism of Trump, and they attacks on any criticism of Trump as “shilling for Hillary”. Then there is their hostility toward any kind of discourse addressing racism as “the identity politics of the liberal elites”
I increasingly find the best description of this irrational “Lord of the Flies”-like mob that that the poor, well-meaning Bernie Sanders unintentionally created is “crypto-Trumpist”
And as always, let me finish with my obligatory statement that I am no “shill” for Hillary, I find many things repugnant about her. But on November 9, either Hillary or Trump will be declared the next US president. A brief review of history shows that there should be little debate about which one would create the best societal terrain for organizing on the left. No, we won’t have access to very many ears when Trump’s reactionary-populist-Bonapartist juggernaut is unleashed.
You’re a shill, Paul.
Paul, who are these Sanders supporters you reference and where are you encountering them? Are they people who you are meeting with IRL, or those you’ve encountered online? How did you identify them as Sanders supporters? By their self-identification alone? And did you believe that part of what they said while discounting every other thing?
Are you truly comfortable using such a wide brush to paint “Sanders supporters … they are …”, as a sweeping definition of such an immense number of people?
I ask because I am a proud Berner and have been since he first announced. I am also online a lot and have seen for myself the incredible amount of hatred there is for Hillary Clinton there, preceding and independent of the Sanders campaign. Some of the creatures expressing this hatred over the past year claimed to be Bernie supporters, but time and again, when I would caution them that they were ill-representing their candidate, they would turn that hatred and vituperative language onto me and prove in a thousand ways that they barely knew who Bernie was and were certainly not followers of his philosophies.
My point: just because someone says they’re for Bernie does not make it so. Simply being a Hillary hater does not give them the agency or legitimacy in online forums as does claiming the identity of being for Bernie, so they misrepresent themselves as such. Bernie pages are flooded with trolls in the weeks post the primaries, many of whom attempt to incite us into hatred and irrationality (let’s all go and burn Philly down!!), and others who attempt to impersonate being one of us as a “concern troll”, pointing us to the logical inevitability of voting for Hillary. The admins of those pages have been quite busy deleting these people and creating ever-more rigorous selection processes for admittance.
I am a Sanders supporter too. But I am not a crypto-Trumpist. I know that that US electoral history – and the recent events in the UK very clearly show that allowing Trump to be elected through cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face-voting will be a disaster for left organizing outside of electoral politics – which is where the most important work must be done.
Therefore, I would encourage people to go ahead and cast that protest vote for Jill Stein on November 8 unless:
1. If the nationwide polling shows it is a close election; and,
2. One’s state is a closely contested state.
in which case ones should cast a vote that does the most to prevent a Trump election i.e. vote for Clinton.
And meanwhile, the Green Party needs to stop these utterly counterproductive resource-wasting presidential campaigns and work on more effective organizing – such as focusing of local, or at msot US congressional races.
All those negatives about Hillary Clinton are true plus she is incompetent, a liar and a mass murderer. Anyone but Hillary!
And the nature of US presidential elections and simple mathematics indicated that the “anyone” will be Trump. That is why I call you people “crypto-Trumopists” becasue you are dishonestly hiding your preference for Trump, or you are useful stooges for Trump.
More of the same Hill-shilling garbage. I am not even a Sander’s supporter, but the lies you mindless Clinton drones will tell yourselves in order to be able to stomach supporting such a corrupt and vile candidate clearly knows no bounds. It’s about the crooked, soulless candidate you support, and has nothing to do with the baseless caricatures of the “Sander’s supporter” that you have all been fabricating for half a year.
I agree with the article and would like to add that Zakaria is disingenuous in calling the TPP and other agreements as free trade. The US for example subsidizes 20% or more of its agricultural exports which destroy subsistence farming in the third world. Also, American manufacturers face environmental and human rights laws that their competitors in the Third World do not have. Both Europe and the U.S. place barriers to the importation of cane sugar, while subsidizing locally grown beet sugar and in the U.S. high fructose corn syrup. Free trade agreements also guarantee the export of government subsidized Canadian beef while preventing the import of U.S. and New Zealand Dairy products.
One of the sad things reading the Zakaria essay is that he more than implies single payer medical and inexpensive state universities are “failed socialist policies”.
It’s like he’s never heard of France or Canada, or frankly Brazil, and a lot of other countries.
Fareed Zakaria’s father (Rafiq Zakaria) was one of the many conservative Muslim politicians in India who have ensured that Muslim women in India stay deprived of their basic dignity and rights. Some of the “special protections” that the Muslim community (read: men) enjoy is summary divorce by orally reciting the word “talaq” three times, polygamy (upto four), no need to pay maintenance. When India’s Supreme Court stepped in in 1985 to block the last outrage in response to a petition by an old divorcee by the name of Shah Bano, Zakaria senior and his ilk got the then “secular” government to change the law.
Fareed Zakaria is an establishment journalist. The fact that he happens to be Muslim makes him suspect in American conservative circles and hence they have gone after him on the plagiarism case. (I have not cared to follow how justified the case was).
Looks like the apple did not fall far from the tree (even though it was a second crop, since his father had two wives).
the author’s statistic – presumably to buttress his argument – that from the 1960s to the 1990s manufacturing jobs remained the same, 17 million, is misleading. population growth – and particularly the massive generational growth from baby boomers who were entering the job market – in actuality means jobs in manufacturing declined.
yes, my conclusion may be called erroneous in a strict sense. so be it. but the authors use of the manufacturing jobs statistic undercuts an otherwise well-structured post.