Fareed Zakaria

Well, it was a huge pleasure, honestly.

But you asked me to do it when I was very young, and it was based on my first book, actually, which was all about illiberal democracy, you know, democracies where elected rulers start to abuse, elected leaders start to abuse the rule of law and, you know, individual rights.

In those days, I was talking about places like

Pakistan and the Philippines, not the United States of America.

And it was a huge pleasure.

And of course, it leaves me wondering, what happened, John?

What am I, chopped liver?

Look, there's no question that that's true.

When I was writing about it, when I coined the phrase illiberal democracy in 96, 97, I was looking at places like Pakistan, the Philippines, Slovakia, Turkey, Erdogan, you could begin to see it happening.

And I always thought that this is not going to affect the developed world as much.

I did actually in my book have a chapter or two about America, but I thought it was sort of like a tendency, a danger that we were becoming too enamored of the idea of these charismatic leaders.

But what I didn't expect is that the institutional framework

of Western democracies would be as fragile as it is.

And in this case, actually, the United States is in worse shape than other places.

No, no, no, no.

More than in places like in Europe.

Giorgia Maloney comes to power in Italy, and she's a fire-breathing right-wing populist.

But she's contained by the institutions.

Her policies have actually not been as radical as people thought they would be, partly because there are lots of institutions, both within Italy and within the European Union, and she's basically not torn them up.

In the United States, we have the oldest constitution in the world, which is great in many ways, but in some ways it's kind of old fashioned.