Lawfare Daily: Revolutions and the Rule of Law

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

In this episode, Michael Feinberg interviews Fareed Zakaria, whose book “Age of Revolutions” has just been issued with a new afterword in light of the return of the Trump Administration. The two discuss intellectual, cultural, and populist revolutions from history and what those events have to teach us about our current political moment.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We don't have a lot of recourses to go to.
0:06.0	Because so many of the checks were institutional.
0:10.0	Congress was meant to do something about this, but it's not like written in the Constitution that it has to.
0:15.0	The president is not meant to call the Attorney General and direct him or her about what to do. But that's a norm,
0:22.7	and it's a norm that developed after Watergate. It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Michael
0:28.1	Feinberg, Public Service Fellow with Lawfare, here today with Fare,
0:33.6	anchor of CNN's GPS and the author of Age of Revolutions.
0:39.6	In some ways, we have a more informal and weaker set of constraints and checks and balances now
0:46.0	compared to many European countries which learned from us and in the 50s, 60s and 70s enacted
0:52.8	in DeRoyas checks and balances.
0:55.8	Today we're talking about Farid's new book, Age of Revolutions.
1:00.4	We're going to be discussing how revolutions,
1:03.3	intellectual, cultural, and political
1:05.6	have affected society and the rule of law throughout the ages.
1:10.4	Now, this book has an afterword, which makes
1:13.8	very clear that it has some applicable lessons to our current moment, particularly in light of
1:20.2	the 2024 election and what's occurred since the inauguration. But the research in writing
1:27.0	took place before that outcome was determined.
1:31.0	So I was hoping you could give us a little bit of the background on what the genesis,
1:36.7	the topic was, and how you came to write this particular work.
1:41.7	Sure. And it actually started a long time before. I mean, from in its
1:46.2	conception, it really began in 2012, 2011, 2012, when I started to notice something that seemed
	...

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