Et tu, Fareed?
- Christian Filli
- May 14, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 13
No, America is neither like Sweden nor Saudi Arabia.
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.” - William James Durant
“We could turn everything into hell with enough stupidity, and maybe we will; but all things considered, I still bet on the US and the West, for all sorts of reasons.” - Jordan B. Peterson (in a recent Q&A session with MIT students)
I recently came across this brilliant expression, “proof of ideological fitness”, which signals the moment when an institution or individual decides to replace objectivity with bullshit, all for the sake of force-fitting world events into the most convenient narrative. It pains me to see that Fareed Zakaria, an American journalist whom I’ve always admired - and probably the only CNN member I still considered worth listening to - has become the latest casualty of the insatiable propaganda machine that characterizes so much of today’s cable news.
The following video clip starts really well, as Fareed explains some of the country’s most striking cultural trends and backs them up with research data. Then he connects his findings with the work of Ronald Inglehart, the renowned political scientist and former director of the World Values Survey (he passed away last year). Fareed discusses Inglehart’s perspective on how the secularization of American society might be linked to political polarization. So far, so good.
Suddenly, however, Fareed goes off on a weird tangent, draws his own arrows over one of Inglehart’s most iconic cultural maps (which he developed in partnership with Christian Welzel) and makes the following observation: “If one were to divide America into two countries, one red and one blue, I suspect Blue America would sit comfortably with Northern European Protestant countries, while Red America’s cultural values would move it closer to Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.”
OK, a few things to consider here. First of all, the World Values Survey has been a serious and rigorous undertaking for decades. There are good reasons for the map below (referenced by Fareed) to look the way it does, with the U.S. placed in proximity to Belgium. It takes some nerve to pencil over it and make a blunt assumption of what it would look like if you were to break countries apart. Technically, one could run the numbers and uncover regional differences, but there are very few countries for which the WVS has actually provided any supporting data (Southern vs Northern Italy would be one of the rare examples). I can only imagine what Inglehart would say to this, were he still around.
As if distorting the research wasn’t bad enough, Fareed manages to keep a straight face when implying that red states such as Texas, Florida and North Carolina could very well be in the same neighborhood as Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. Really?!
Let’s see … Are we talking about the same Saudi Arabia that maintains a strict ban on consumption, importation, brewing and selling of alcohol? The same Saudi Arabia that is an absolute monarchy, where the royal family exerts complete control over the economy, the government, the press and civic life? The same Saudi Arabia that requires all non-Muslim foreigners attempting to become citizens to convert to Islam? The same Saudi Arabia that is ranked 147th out of 156 countries for gender parity?
How about Nigeria? Oh, you mean the Nigeria where anyone found guilty of homosexuality faces up to 14 years in prison (and may be sentenced to death by stoning in states governed by Shari’a law)? Or the Nigeria where Boko Haram - which means “Western education is forbidden” - has been terrorizing religious and political groups, local police, and children (girls AND boys) since 2002? Or the Nigeria that ranks 154th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption index?
The second part to Fareed’s analysis sounds even more delusional, if not comical. “I suspect Blue America would sit comfortably with Northern European Protestant countries”, he says. Comfortably? This reminded me of a scene in the movie TWINS, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character Julius reveals to Vincent, played by Danny deVito, that they are twin brothers. Vincent’s reply: “Oh, obviously! The moment I sat down, I thought I was looking into a mirror!”
Surely, a person traveling to Copenhagen could mistakenly think they’ve landed in San Francisco or Los Angeles!? One only needs to look at demographics - all of the Nordic nations (Swedes, Danes, Finns, Norwegians and Icelanders) are vastly dominated by ethnic majorities - to understand that there is a cultural abyss separating those populations from the ones in, say, New York, Illinois or California (all blue states). Though it’s true that immigration has surged in places like Sweden and Denmark, integration remains a huge challenge (I have yet to see a country do a better job at this than the U.S.).
It’s also worth highlighting the fact that, despite it being a very progressive thing to try and emulate the Vikings, reality on the ground is seldom understood by the likes of politicians such as Bernie Sanders. Rather than altruistic utopias, Nordic countries have individualistic societies (see chart below). Democrats have a really hard time reconciling this with high taxes and big social welfare, so it’s no wonder that extremely generous “housing first” programs have only made the problem of homelessness along the West Coast dramatically worse over the years. As one author eloquently described the Scandinavian mindset a few years ago: “The way [Sanders] embraced the term ‘socialist’ has reinforced the American misunderstanding that universal social policies always require sacrifice for the good of others, and that such policies are anathema to the entrepreneurial, individualistic American spirit. It’s actually the other way around. For people to support a Nordic-style approach is not an act of altruism but of self-promotion.”
This recent episode of Fareed’s “GPS” shows that he might, ironically, have lost his compass, and I can only speculate that this is (at least in part) a result of him acting under the influence of his network's political ideology - hence the expression “proof of ideological fitness”. It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to read between the lines, “look, if it weren’t for you, Republicans, we would be shoulder to shoulder with Finland, the happiest country in the world”.
Fareed is certainly correct in pointing out the radical bifurcation in American culture and politics. But he oversimplifies the divide between “urban, educated, multiracial and secular” and “rural, less educated, white and religious”. If only reality were this straightforward (he omits the fact that less than 20% of Americans live in rural areas yet national elections continue to be highly competitive between the two parties).
As far as I can tell, a big reason for the U.S. being so polarized today is precisely because of this kind of inflammatory and nonsensical rhetoric propagated by the mainstream media (left AND right). Tragically, the focus of journalism now seems to be on adding fuel to the fire, which only leads to the steady dismantling of the country’s core foundations, as well as a complete erosion of trust in institutions. And without institutions, a nation becomes unsustainable.
A good read …
by Stephan Jensen (Quillette)
“If the ‘war’ is over what everyone else thinks, it’s not won until everyone else thinks the same as you - or you are forced to think the same as everyone else. That result is both the justification for and consequence of mutual escalation. Once ‘all or nothing’ becomes the central assumption, the end point is the same regardless of whether it’s the hard Left or the populist Right that wins: the end of liberal democracy and the beginning of totalitarianism. The destruction is not wrought by the Left or the Right alone, but by the culture war itself.”
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