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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Where Does the Democratic Party Go from Here?; As A.I. Spending Soars, So Do the Societal Costs; Interview With Author Karen Hao; Interview With Author Dan Wang. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired October 26, 2025 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:40]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, New Yorkers have begun to vote for a new mayor. The main candidates are a very progressive 34-year-old and a man, almost double his age, who left the governor's office in scandal, and already lost to the younger man in the Democratic primary.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI (D), NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL CANDIDATE: We have one.

ZAKARIA: What does this race tell us about the state of the Democratic Party in America? I'll talk to Astead Herndon and Elaine Kamarck.

Also, these stats from the "Financial Times" are stunning. A.I. has accounted for 40 percent of American GDP growth and 80 percent of its stock market gains so far this year.

Is the industry getting out of control before its product even becomes smarter than us?

And whatever happens in this round of the U.S.-China trade war.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We don't have tariffs, we're not going to have national security.

ZAKARIA: Another one will surely be coming soon. Does one of the opponents have the ability to land a knockout punch? I'll ask an expert.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

If you watch the news these days and feel it beyond the daily chaos, something seems broken in our politics, you're not alone. A recent Pew survey of 23 countries finds that a median of 58 percent of adults are dissatisfied with how their democracy works. In the U.S., more than 60 percent share that view. In Italy and France, nearly 7 in 10. People still prefer democracy to autocracy but dissatisfaction and despair have become ubiquitous.

Now, when I bring this up with people of a certain age, they often recall the 1970s. Then too Western democracies looked exhausted. In the U.S., inflation, Vietnam and Watergate had eroded public confidence. Samuel Huntington warned about the governability of democracy. Daniel Bell saw capitalism corroding the virtues that sustained it. Yet in the 1980s, things turned around. Economic reform and technological dynamism restored faith.

Within a decade, communism collapsed and liberal democracy stood triumphant. The crisis of the 1970s proved to be a prelude to renewal. But today's malaise feels different and deeper. The earlier crisis was managerial. Governments performed poorly, but people still believed in the system. The Supreme Court was respected. Congress was functional. The press was authoritative. People wanted the rules enforced.

Now they don't believe in the rules. Today, America's central institutions, courts, media, universities, even elections are widely viewed as biased, rigged. Trust in government has fallen to about 20 percent. Congressional approval often hovers in the teens. The media is trusted by less than a third of Americans, down from nearly three quarters in the 1970s.

The issue is not competence, but cohesion. Institutions once commanded respect because they seemed impersonal and rule bound. Today, they are seen as political actors. In the first episode of Michael Lewis's brilliant podcast "Against the Rules," he talked about how in sports fans shout, ref, you suck, even though officiating today is as accurate as ever. The problem isn't performance. It's perception. Once people decide the ref is biased, no amount of precision restores trust.

The same story plays out in law, journalism and politics. When referees are opaque or distrusted, the entire contest feels illegitimate. Lewis's point explains why accountability alone doesn't fix democracy.

[10:05:05]

More transparency can make bias more visible, which feeds rather than cures cynicism. This helps explain the peculiar appeal of Donald Trump. He has abandoned the pretense of neutrality altogether as president. He acts personally, politically, even punitively, and he does so openly. To his supporters that candor is disarming. If all institutions are biased, better an avowed partisan than a hypocrite claiming neutrality.

A 2023 study by Sung In Kim and Peter Hall confirms this pattern. When citizens perceived the system as unfair or biased, they shift preference from neutral process to direct personalized rule. Leaders who present themselves as fighters rather than referees, who attack courts, media and bureaucracies gain credibility precisely because they reject the system's pretense of fairness.

Trump's rise also exposes a deeper divide between left and right populisms. Kim and Hall find that when people see unfairness as personal, my job, my income, my future are unfair, they turn to right- wing populists whose rhetoric frames their pain as betrayal by elites and outsiders. When they see unfairness as social, society treats others unfairly, they gravitate to left populists who promise things like redistribution.

In recent years, the shocks that most unsettle people -- deindustrialization, automation, migration, secularization -- generate a sense of personal rather than social unfairness. Workers fear being replaced, not merely that others are poor. That fear produces anger and fits naturally with the rights' narrative against migrants, about protection, borders, and national revival. Left populists call for solidarity. Right populists promise vengeance.

In anxious societies, vengeance is the easier appeal. Add to this a decades-long campaign on the right to discredit America's basic institutions, from bureaucracies to the press, and trust has eroded just as intended.

The 1970s crisis ended when leaders set about making democracy deliver. The people had doubted government competence, but not its legitimacy. Today's challenge is moral, not managerial. Institutions still function, but they've lost their aura of fairness. When citizens no longer trust the referees, they stop obeying the rules. Every election becomes a civil war by other means. Truth itself becomes tribal.

We have entered democracies' post referee age. A world where institutions are disbelieved, impartiality mocked, and citizens choose sides not by policy but identity. The '70s crisis produced a revival once people decided democracy was worth repairing. Ours will end only when we decide it's worth believing again. Fifty years ago, people doubted their governments. Today, they doubt each other.

The next democratic revival will not come from clever managers or technocratic reforms. It will come from a rediscovery of trust. The invisible rule that makes all others possible. Unless we can believe again that the referee is trying to be fair, we will keep shouting, ref, you suck, at our own democracy, and then wonder why the game no longer feels worth playing.

Go to CNN.com/Fareed for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.

Early voting has begun in New York City, where residents are tasked with choosing their next mayor. The frontrunner, Zoran Mamdani, a man who has just celebrated his 34th birthday, who identifies as a Democratic socialist and who campaigned on freezing rents, free busses and free childcare. He would pay for much of it by raising taxes on the rich.

What does Mamdani's rise say about the Democratic Party's future nationwide?

Joining me today are Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at Brookings and an expert in American electoral politics, and Astead Herndon, who has just started a new job as editorial director at Vox. He was formerly a national politics reporter at "The New York Times."

Welcome to both of you.

Elaine, you have this fascinating report out with Bill Galston. It's called "Renewing the Democratic Party." It's published in February.

[10:10:02]

And your basic thesis is that the Democratic Party, if you look at the 2024 election and you compare it to the two or three elections before, has just -- the collapse of the working class support for the Democratic Party is the big picture, right? And if you look at, you have these charts, presidential election by bachelor's degree attainment. In other words, do people have a bachelor's degree or not? The population that does, it's a sea of blue of Democrats. When you look at the people who don't, it's a sea of red.

That is the core weakness that the Democratic Party has, right?

ELAINE KAMARCK, SENIOR FELLOW, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Yes, it is. Absolutely. And we've been seeing this for some decades now. But it was particularly apparent in the 2024 presidential election where Kamala did quite well at compared to Biden among the upper educated and upper income people. But she fell off among people without a college degrees. And she even lost Hispanic and African-American men. So it was -- it was a dramatic shift.

ZAKARIA: And finally, I want to get at the why have these people left? And you have this polling that shows, you know, and this might surprise people, when you ask Americans, do they think the Democrats are too liberal or the Republicans are too conservative? The verdict is absolutely clear. They think that the Democratic Party is too liberal. It's 58 percent think that versus 47 percent who think the Republicans are too conservative.

When you ask them, was Trump too conservative? Only 31 percent thought that. Was Harris too liberal? 49 percent think that. So what is it that they mean by too liberal? You think it's fundamentally the cultural issues, right?

KAMARCK: Yes. You know, there's a debate been going on in the Democratic Party for years now, which is it culture or is it the economy? The fact is, it's both, because when you get out of step on one of the cultural issues, people can't hear the message on the economy. So you can have a great message on the economy. But if people think you're in favor of criminals and don't care about victims, as happened as far back as 1988, in the Dukakis race, or if people think you're for they them versus you, which happened in the Harris race, they're not hearing your economic message.

Interestingly enough, when you poll people on economics, affordability, et cetera., Democrats and safety net issues, Democrats do fairly well. But boy, oh, boy, those cultural issues, they come in and they get the Democrats every time.

ZAKARIA: So when you hear all this, Astead, what is your reaction? ASTEAD HERNDON, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, VOX: Yes, I think this analysis

really holds up. It speaks to my experience in terms of covering Zohran Mamdani and his rise. Even though this person is 34, he's been living in the failures of the Democratic Party for a long time. His version of Democratic socialism is economics first. He lives in the kind of class based language of talking to people, and so you can meet people along the way. Who he's been canvasing with for years in the bay ridges and amongst working class people of color, amongst first generation Americans, and trying to give them a message that the Democratic Party is not focused on tangible kitchen table things.

And I think it's important to realize that maybe Harris and Biden did have an economic message in terms of when it came to the general election, but in my experience, in terms of reporting, a lot of this cake was baked early. In 2021, in 2022, when people felt that Democrats were ignoring an inflation crisis, when people felt that Democrats were ignoring a crisis on the southern border in terms of people coming into the country.

And so I think it's a little bit difficult sometimes to parse perception from reality, because it seems, in my experience, actually, those perceptions got baked in early around Biden. So by the time they were trying to moderate on immigration, by the time they were trying to lay out an economic plan, people had already felt that they had not met them in their time of need. So much so that when we go back to voters right now, they will often kind of lay out what I think Elaine is saying here, that they all sometimes do kind of agree with Democrats broadly, but they don't know what their economic message is.

And so when we ask people, what do Democrats stand for? They know the cultural answers, but they don't have a clear answer on everything else. That's where the left, I think, has come in. And Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, AOC and others have been trying to lay out a platform that they think can meet that.

ZAKARIA: Stay with us. When we come back, I want to talk about justice, the energy for the Democratic Party appears to be with progressives like Mamdani and AOC, but will that alienate the party's moderate voters, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:19:15]

ZAKARIA: And we are back with Elaine Kamarck and Astead Herndon.

So, Astead, in your reporting, you know, how do you deal with it? Because you have this wonderful portrait of Mamdani and how he rose. On the one hand, you write, "He does talk a lot about very simple working class issues, affordability." But he is very left-wing on a lot of progressive issues that clearly excite the base.

HERNDON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: You know, Palestine being the being the best example. Yet we know that when you pull back and ask yourself nationally, how is this going to play, it's going to play badly for the Democrats.

HERNDON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: But how do -- how was he able to square the circle?

HERNDON: You know, Zohran Mamdani would say he's running for race in New York City, that he's not trying to lay out a lesson for the Democrats broadly, but of course, Democrats are looking for lessons that they can take.

[10:20:03]

And I think you point out an important challenge for them, whether it's the midterm races next year or even in the presidential primary, the question of electability, should they prioritize people who can appeal to people in general elections might overwhelm even the ways they identify with Zohran Mamdani's maybe values on a certain issue, but I think there's a couple important numbers to point out.

If we think about particularly his pro -- his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians, that has become a kind of fairly popular issue among Democrats. We look at Gallup polling, we look at the latest numbers. He's -- the Democratic base is much closer to Zohran Mamdani's language than they are Chuck Schumer's, at least right now. And so it's changed the electoral calculus from on this issue.

But I think to your question, the biggest 180 you've seen from him is on policing, where he has made clear that he has stepped away from his language in 2020. But I think the important place to point out is where he's made big concessions. And that's where a lot of folks on the left have tripped up, particularly on policing. I think it speaks to what Elaine said earlier. They recognize that folks feel nervous about their own safety. It will overwhelm any other issue.

ZAKARIA: Elaine, so what do you do about this challenge, which is very real, right? Like the people who have real energy are the Mamdanis of the world, the AOCs of the world. Bernie, to a certain extent, the centrists lack the fire in the belly that gets people out, particularly in, you know, midterm elections and things like that.

KAMARCK: Well, first of all, let's not overinterpret what New York City means for midterm elections. Secondly, this midterm will feature three big races. In New Jersey and Virginia's governors races, you will have very much centrist candidates, most likely winning. And in New York, obviously Mamdani looks to be way ahead. Now, what happens? And this is why the culture issues get so important, is that the Republican Party is expert at taking some small thing and turning it into a gigantic issue.

Mamdani's big problem is not free busses. Most Americans don't go to work on a bus. It's not rent control. Most communities in America don't even have rent control. But boy, it's police and it's defund the police, which he said and has said over and over. And I'm glad that he's trying to walk that back. But it really won't matter because in fact the Republicans will put this in every single one of their ads against Democrats, no matter what the Democrats have said. So that's where the danger is.

ZAKARIA: You know, I think that you were saying some of the perceptions of Biden were baked in early. But what I'm struck by about the Biden administration, you could not have had a better case study of trying to make economics work for you. Right?

HERNDON: That's right/

ZAKARIA: The Biden administration spent so much money on red America, on working class America.

HERNDON: Yes.

ZAKARIA: You've seen the statistics. Something like 80 percent of the money from the infrastructure. And, you know, if you went to red counties and Biden would boast of that, and those people voted against him and Kamala Harris in greater numbers.

HERNDON: Yes, it's a huge lesson. I think when the Biden administration came in, they really took a belief that policy would be politics, that as long as they follow through on some of these issues, that they would get the kind of electoral return in the end. I think they have had learned a harsh lesson about bureaucracy. I think they learned a lesson about when you pass something versus if it's reaching people/

ZAKARIA: Right.

HERNDON: I think they've learned a lesson about messaging and are they pitching what they did in a specific way?

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: And if you mishandle immigration and you mishandle --

HERNDON: Exactly. Those issues can overwhelm. Actually reminds me of something Mamdani told me, which is that he remembered going into Albany and seeing -- and feeling like Democrats always pass a bill and they have to go back to their voters and say, here's how it was good for you. He's like, if you do your job right, they'll know. And I think that's a difference in philosophy that goes beyond right, left or center.

There's a version of Democrats that can just figure them, that can just really focus on policies that have more tangible effect to people. And I think you're going to see more of that across ideological divides.

ZAKARIA: All right. We got to leave it at that. But both of you, this is terrific conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Next on GPS, A.I. is often cited as a solution for all our problems. Making life safer, easier and more efficient. But what is the race to develop this technology costing us? Ill speak to an expert when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:28:48]

ZAKARIA: AGI is the holy grail for today's tech elite. It stands for artificial general intelligence and AGI will be achieved when A.I. is as smart as humans. The frenzy to get to that goal and others along the way has been responsible for a huge percent of U.S. GDP growth this year. But does this race make sense? And what are its costs?

Journalist and author of the book "Empire of A.I.," Karen Hao joins me now.

Welcome, Karen. So when people talk about the U.S. economy now, it's becoming increasingly clear that what is at the heart of the U.S. economy right now is just A.I. There's one data point that seems to suggest that spending on artificial intelligence makes up over 40 percent of GDP growth this year. Jason Furman at Harvard says that in the last quarter, it seems like it was 90 percent of growth in in the U.S., economy was all just A.I. spending.

When you look at the scale of this spending and what's the thing that worries you most? Is it the energy use because they need huge amounts of energy to make this work?

[10:30:00]

KAREN HAO, AUTHOR, "EMPIRE OF A.I.": Yes. It is, absolutely. The environmental fallout from this kind of skeletal cost approach is astronomical. I mean, some of these supercomputers that are being planned, OpenAI and Meta have both planned for facilities that would be the size of Manhattan, where one of those facilities would also use as much energy as New York City.

And when earlier this year, McKinsey came out with a report that showed that based on a conservative scenario, all of these data centers would need to consume two states of Californias worth of energy. And an accelerated scenario, it would be six states of California. And that's just talking about the energy. But then what energy source are they using? And when you look at the numbers, it's primarily fossil fuel. So, they are --

ZAKARIA: A lot of natural gas, right?

HAO: They single-handedly revitalizing the natural gas and coal industries. That's an extraordinary amount of carbon emissions. That's not only accelerating climate change, but also leading to huge public health concerns with the air pollution.

We've seen some phenomenal reporting out of Memphis, Tennessee, about the fact that Grok is being trained on a supercomputer called Colossus in Memphis that is being powered by 35 methane gas turbines that are pumping extraordinary amounts of pollutants into this community's air.

ZAKARIA: And that's Elon Musk, the guy who started Tesla.

HAO: Yes. ZAKARIA: But -- and it's all this race. And as you said, it's not clear what the goal is. It's not clear what difference it makes to win. I mean, at some level, is this a testosterone fueled competition among some very ambitious, egotistical men?

HAO: Absolutely. I mean, it's not a coincidence that every single tech billionaire has their own A.I. company now, and they're all jostling to position their A.I. company as somehow superior to the others. They're basically trying to refashion A.I. in their image, and that's why none of them are actually collaborating and they're all trying to race on ultimately a technology that is commoditized.

ZAKARIA: So, when you look at the landscape now, these companies are racing to the future. The Trump administration is not particularly regulating or restraining them in any way. Can this just go on? I mean, these companies are very rich, but at some point, don't they need to show a return on this investment?

HAO: Absolutely. I mean, I think we are in a huge bubble that is going to pop. There's going to be a massive market correction at some point that could have ripple effects across the global economy.

When you look at the cash balance of these companies, they are spending trillions in the next few years to build out all of this computational infrastructure. And they've only achieved tens of billions in revenue. Tens of billions versus trillions just doesn't make sense as a balance sheet.

And they -- you can see that the companies are really trying to figure out how to close that gap. Initially, they tried subscriptions but they discovered that actually the average person is unwilling to pay for this technology, and businesses are no longer adopting these technologies with -- paying for subscriptions either.

And so, now the reason why I think OpenAI is ultimately adding feeds into ChatGPT and creating an A.I. generated TikTok is because they are going to make an advertising play, and they're going to try and fill the gap with advertising revenue. But when you look at something like Google, which has some of the largest ad revenue, they haven't -- last year they didn't even achieve $300 billion worth of ad revenue. That's -- and that is one of the most successful advertising businesses ever.

ZAKARIA: In the history of the world, yes.

HAO: And so, how are they going to fill the trillions of dollars of spending? It's just not possible.

ZAKARIA: So, when you ask the people who are in these companies these kinds of questions, what do they say?

HAO: They think a lot of these people have a quasi-religious belief that AGI is possible, it's imminent, and that when it happens it is going to have cataclysmic shifts on society. And either that shift will be in the positive direction or the negative direction. But for people who think it's going to be in the positive direction, they think when AGI arrives, it will solve all of these problems. AGI will help us figure out how to make trillions of dollars. AGI will fix all the air pollution problems and the climate change acceleration and so on and so forth. And what I point out would point out is, you know, ultimately, they are trying to conceive of a technology as an everything machine. They're trying to sell this idea, that one single piece of technology will be able to do anything for anyone.

And the cost, they say, is everything that everyone has ever owned, all of our data, all of our intellectual property, all of the land, water, energy. And once you realize that that is how they're framing it, it doesn't sound like a good bargain at all.

ZAKARIA: A sobering perspective.

[10:35:00]

Karen, thank you so much.

HAO: Thank you so much.

ZAKARIA: Terrific book. Next on GPS, China hasn't backed down in its trade war with the U.S. It's fought back. But is Beijing ready for prolonged showdown with Washington? I'll ask Dan Wang, who has written an important new book on China.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: The U.S.-China relationship under Trump 2.0 has been chilly at best, with a tit for tat trade war highlighted by escalating tariffs.

[10:40:06]

One striking feature of the dynamic between the two nations has been Beijing's consistent pushback to American pressure. Is Beijing prepared and able to beat Donald Trump at his own game?

Dan Wang is here with me. He is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover History Lab and the author of the excellent book "Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future." Dan, pleasure to have you on.

So, when I look at your book, it feels like you do such a good job in explaining how China has built this extraordinary economy. Probably the fastest growth of any large country in history using these engineering principles of, you know, kind of building fast and big and at scale and figuring out what the next thing to do is. But now it seems like Xi Jinping is moving to a more political set of goals, you know, communist party control, nationalism to push China's influence around the world. Do you see that as a -- as an -- you know, as a shift, as a turn, or a natural evolution?

DAN WANG, AUTHOR, "BREAKNECK: CHINA'S QUEST TO ENGINEER THE FUTURE": I see it as an intensification of the engineering state. So, this week, the communist party announced a new communique for the fourth plenum of the communist party gathering, in which they announced that they want to pursue a modernized industrial system. And so, self- sufficiency, some degree of sovereignty, some degree of tech modernization has always been very present in the Chinese system. And under Xi Jinping, he has really intensified it.

Xi Jinping is very well known for pursuing the belt and road project, which I view as first and foremost a big project to export a lot of China's infrastructure development, as well as excess capacity to the global south as well as around the world. And there is also a big plan to try to make a lot more semiconductors, make a lot more clean tech, make a lot more solar. That is all very much part of Xi's agenda.

ZAKARIA: It feels like Xi is preparing China for a struggle with the U.S. Is the Chinese economy, and in your opinion Chinese society, willing to take the pain that such struggle, decoupling, partial decoupling might entail?

WANG: If we take a look at some of the rhetoric around Xi Jinping as well as the broader communist party, I think, you've put your finger on one of the core elements of Xi's agenda, which is struggle. Struggle is a term that comes up a lot with Xi Jinping. It comes from Mao Zedong's on protracted war. There's a lot of struggle involved.

And I absolutely see that the communist party sees itself as a Leninist organization that is trying to heave the population into modernity by hook or by crook. And the population does not always love to be heaved thus.

And so, when I'm thinking about some of the demands that these richer Shanghainese are being asked to do, to give up their connections to New York City or their connections to London, their ability to send their kids into American universities like Stanford, I think, they are thinking about, you know, how best they reconcile being less integrated with the rest of the world. And is certainly challenging for many creative types who felt that they were getting closer to the United States, getting closer to thinking about Silicon Valley, as well as New York civil society. Many of them do have to cut off a lot of their ties, and I think that's making people really uncomfortable in all sorts of ways.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that he is willing to, in fact, even eager for confrontation with America because that is part of the struggle that will rally Chinese around him and the party?

WANG: I think Xi is cautious. He is patient. He is very willing to go into the gray zone to sometimes take a nip at what the Americans are doing. But I don't see that Xi Jinping is going to do something really outrageous, really, really bold any time soon.

The Xi governing style is to try to push and see what he can get away with, whether that's in Taiwan, that's in the South China Sea, whether that's in negotiations with Donald Trump in some sort of way. He's also capable of some sort of tactical adjustment.

He is someone who is probably going to be reigning for as long as it pleases him. And so, I feel like he is careful and cautious enough not to do any big, bold moves anytime soon. ZAKARIA: What do you think the deal will look like assuming that the two sides come because both need a deal? What do you think the outlines of it will be?

WANG: Fareed, I lived through the very first trade war in Beijing. And what I kept observing was that any time either side got quite close to a trade deal, one side would walk away. Sometimes that was Trump, sometimes that was Xi, because they didn't believe that they had a really good deal. And I think both sides have persistently miscalculated about what the other party is willing to bear.

[10:45:00]

I think we saw it this time with China's announcement of controls on rare earth magnets, that the communist party announced two weeks ago. We can also see that Trump isn't always very aware of what's going on in the Chinese system. And what I fear is that we may come to some sort of a temporary trade truce.

The earlier truce was famously named the Phase One trade deal. You know, did we get to phase two? Did we get to phase 1.5? Not really. And so, what I fear is that the confrontation between the U.S. and China is very real, that maybe we will have some sort of temporary truce, but I fear it won't be lasting for very long time.

ZAKARIA: I think you're absolutely right, because for both sides, it seems like for domestic reasons, a win-win is difficult to sell. There has to be an element of win-lose that I won and the other guy gave more. You've got to come back and talk to us more about this. Thank you, Dan.

Next on GPS, for months, the Trump administration has accused Europe of stifling free speech. It has a point. But is it practicing what it preaches? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:50:45]

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. As the Trump administration reshapes the world, it's found a new moral mission, the defense of free speech. "The New York Times" reports that the White House is weighing plans to prioritize, among others, European refugees who have been, quote, "targeted for peaceful expression of views online, such as opposition to mass migration or support for populist political parties."

Vice President J.D. Vance struck a similar theme and is now infamous speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, where he warned --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

J.D. VANCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Vance does make a legitimate point. Europe's restrictions on speech are often excessive. Many of the continent's hate speech laws are supposed to preserve social cohesion, and there are good historical reasons for this effort.

After the 20th century horrors of nationalist aggression, fascism and genocide, some European countries wrote constitutions that limit speech when it threatens the rights or safety of others. Germany, for instance, banned holocaust denial and Nazi symbols, with violators facing jail time.

But in our internet age, where everyone has a megaphone, these laws reach too far and too wide. The problem is most acute in the U.K. Since it doesn't have a formal constitution, the country's free speech laws rely on a patchwork of outdated and overlapping acts that give police remarkable discretion over what people can say legally.

The results of such vague laws can be absurd and chilling. "The Times" of London found that police in England and Wales made more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 for so-called grossly offensive online messages. That's about 33 arrests per day, and only a tiny fraction led to convictions.

In one notable example of apparent overreach, Irish comedian Graham Linehan was arrested last month at London's Heathrow airport on suspicion of inciting violence after several crude transphobic posts on X sent from his home in the U.S. As "The Atlantic's" Helen Lewis puts it, open debate is often obnoxious, upsetting, or rude. But none of these adjectives should make it a police matter.

These attempts to suppress divisive rhetoric can also backfire. The Danish free speech scholar Jacob Mchangama writes in "Foreign Affairs" that Europe's hate speech laws often empower the very figures they target. He writes that, far-right leaders such as Marine Le Pen in France, Bjorn Hocke in Germany, and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands have gained public appeal after being prosecuted under such restrictions.

Across the Atlantic, the U.S. is one of the global outliers in protecting speech. The First Amendment safeguards even the most hateful expressions unless they are intended to provoke imminent lawless action.

In the wake of the McCarthy era repressions of the 1950s, the highest standard on free speech was set in 1969 by Brandenburg v. Ohio, when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of a Ku Klux Klan leader. This absolutism is now brandished by U.S. conservatives as a moral weapon against European censorship but, strangely, not at home in America.

We are currently witnessing the most anti-free speech U.S. administration since the McCarthy era. While preaching liberty abroad, the Trump administration has moved to punish universities, media outlets, and law firms, and detained student activists like Columbia University's Mahmoud Khalil over pro-Palestinian speech. There's some kind of bizarre parallel at play here. As the Trump administration considers admitting refugees of speech deemed offensive under Europe's laws, it is also trying to deport or deny visas to foreigners for speech it deems as offensive in the U.S. So far, federal judges, including some appointed by Trump, have repeatedly ruled against the administration on First Amendment grounds.

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But as former ACLU president Nadine Strossen points out, Trump doesn't care if he's going to lose in the courts of law, because he still has enormous economic and political leverage. What matters, she says, is that the president is using every government tool available, regulatory agencies, funding sources, and threats of prosecution to act against dissent.

So, yes, Europe's hate speech laws are often archaic and unfit for the internet age. Its police are too quick to intervene in debates that belong in the public square. But Europe remains largely rooted in democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law. It would be great if the Trump administration could practice at home what it preaches abroad.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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