Fareed Zakaria Was A Reaganite, Now A Centrist?

At Claremont McKenna College's Athenaeum, Fareed Zakaria gave his take on the future of the G.O.P and why he thinks it'll continue to lose elections until it moves to the center.

Here's the full, direct quotation from Fareed Zakaria on a question Tuesday night related to the future of conservatism and related to an article he wrote in February 2008 about where the party is going.

"There will either be a kind of reinvention of conservatism, or they will continue to lose elections. I still continue to believe that.

"Look at what has happened in Europe. In the height of what is economic depression since the great depression, who has been elected? The enter right in Germany, the center right in France, the center right rules in Italy and the left wing governments in Britain and Spain are unpopular and will probably lose office. Why? Because in each of these cases, the enter right has adopted the policies of the center. If you listen to Sarkozy, Sarkozy wants to regulate the bankers and their pay, Sarkozy wants to regulate more than any leader in the Western world -- whether left wing or right wing. If you listen to David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, he is more green and more left wing on the issues that I am talking about then Gordon Brown, the Labour Prime Minister.

I believe that the political geniuses of the post Cold War world were Bill Clinton and Tony Blair who both understood that for the survival of their political movements, they had to move them and fast to the center. In a way, what the right wing parties that are doing well in Europe have done is adopt Blairism as their solution to find some areas where they can possibly continue to be conservative, but for the main part they have moved very dramatically to the center. If you look at Sarkozy or Merkel -- the Germany chancellor's platforms -- can you find for me any sense in which they would be conservative by traditional American views? It's very hard to find. So the vital space is clearly in this centrist, market friendly place.

Now could you find that the Republican Party goes there? Absolutely. Mitt Romney in his first and second incarnation was much more that person. There are still others like that. BUt the heart and soul of the Republican party, at this point, has become a Southern and Western party with roots in a kind of nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia. It will have to find some way to deal with that problem. I don't mean to say that that's true of all Republicans, when you need foot soldiers in elections, when you need to knock on doors, the people that come out for the Republican party tend to ome from that world and it is no accident that the Republican primary debate -- seven people were there, but I think it was only two that raised their hands and said that they believed in evolution. That's what I mean. You're going to have a problem in modern America, in modern young America if you believe that the world was created 45,000 years ago. That's a problem they'll have to solve. Can they solve it? Of course they can. Every large political movement has wings within it and Sarah Palin is a Republican, but so is Newt Gingrich, who is very forward looking and very modern in all those senses.”

The question isn't what is "centrist" relative to a global community, but what is centrist relative to the countries in question. By that determination, Sarkozy is very right leaning -- he wants to do away with the 35 hour work week, for instance and have a more sensible policy vis a vis crime. Similarly, Germany's Angela Merkel's new government is more of a move to the libertarian right, than the center, as it is all but eliminating the progressivity of its income tax.

At one point, he described himself as a Reaganite -- a political philosophy that certainly has its share of people calling it "extreme." No one, I know, for instance, has ever called it "centrist."

Here is Zakaria quoted in 2005 in New York Magazine.

Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from observing the Indian state. “People often say, ‘How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?’ Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don’t understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed.

“The second,” he continues, “is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.”

I don't believe that the world has changed enough in barely three and a half years to account for this kind of transformation in someone's world views.

Could it be that his national exposure has led him to give more, well, conventional views and might the Republican Party suffer from the same kind of problem?

From where I'm looking, the problem with the Republican Party is that it has so few leaders that can capitalize on the conservatism of the American electorate. Fully 40 percent of Americans described themselves as conservative in a recent poll. The problem with the Republican Party under Bush was that for many it represented a kind of "me too" conservatism -- the very kind of conservatism that was so unpopular and that Zakaria would have us become.