AUTUMN OF OUR DISCONTENT

Fareed Zakaria's latest book-Age of Revolutions-takes a deep look at what ails liberal democracies and offers some possible solutions

- T.C.A. Raghavan

Fareed Zakaria stands out even among the numerous success stories of Indian immigrants in the US for his reputation as a columnist, an author and a television anchor. This is not because he is interpreting developments in India or Asia for First World audiences. He may do that occasionally, but his success is unusual because despite his first-generation immigrant origin Zakaria occupies the elevated perch of construing developments in the US and Europe for Americans and Europeans.

This is in so many ways both an inversion of the traditional stereotypes of how the West views the Occident, as a vindication of the overall success of the US as a nation-state in general and of its policy of assimilation.

Yet a deep concern about the future of the US and the way of life that underwrites its success story so far permeates Age of Revolutions and has motivated it. "The future of America in an age of Trump' can easily, if somewhat simplistically, be summarised as its principal theme.

In a conversation with this reviewer, Zakaria explained that what he was investigating was not simply an American predicament but meant "grappling with a broader phenomenon", not just in the West but also in Turkey, Brazil and India, with different variants of populism. "I realised that this was the rise of something very powerful-in a sense an assertion against liberal, urban educated elites who had been charge for the past four or five decades," he said.