Science & Tech Quote by Fareed Zakaria

Nostalgia is doing real political work here. Zakaria isn’t pining for sock hops; he’s making a prosecutorial case that America’s current prosperity is rented, not earned. The boom “we see today” is framed as compound interest on a mid-century burst of public ambition: highways that rewired commerce, science funding that seeded entire industries, schools that built a broad middle, immigration that refreshed the talent pool. He’s quietly arguing that growth is not a natural resource. It’s a policy artifact.

The move is tactical: shift the growth debate away from personality-driven “leadership” narratives and toward boring, expensive systems. By choosing the 1950s and ’60s, he invokes an era conservatives often mythologize while spotlighting the parts of that era that were unapologetically activist government. The subtext is a rebuke to contemporary austerity and short-termism: you can’t slash public investment, underfund education, and choke immigration, then still expect the dividends of an earlier social contract.

There’s also an implicit warning about complacency. Calling public education “the envy of the world” reads less like a victory lap than a reminder of status lost, or at least contested, in a globalized economy. Contextually, this fits Zakaria’s broader brand of centrist-globalist critique: America’s edge came from openness and institution-building, and the political instinct to retreat from both is less a culture-war posture than an economic self-sabotage.