Fareed Zakaria's essay "The New Face of the Left" (Newsweek,  April 30, 2001 p. 32) is a confused and confusing diatribe against the international movement opposing corporate-directed globalization.  The essay is off the mark in so many places that it is hard to know where to begin criticizing it.  Certainly its most obvious problem lies in Zakaria's apparently comprehensive ignorance regarding the actual people who make up this movement. Zakaria feigns familiarity with the protesters, their beliefs, even their motivations and intentions.

      Yet he gets so many things wrong that it's obvious he has had little if any direct contact with real movement activists.  For over a year, I have been interviewing and working alongside these activists.   So why could I recognize almost nothing I know of them in Zakaria's distorted portrait?  He seems to have constructed a sort of protester piñata out of media caricatures and misrepresentations, and then whacks away at it with stock neoliberal cliches, backed up only by a strained, if novel, reading of left political history.  The result is an uninformative hatchet job.

Flippant Dismissal Ignores Serious Critics

      Let me try to tease out and respond to some of Zakaria's criticisms of the anti-corporate globalization movement.  He begins with a condescending dismissal of the movement's views, moaning about how "pointless" it is to have to "rebut, one more time, the arguments made by the protesters in Quebec City. "  Flippant and patronizing, his tone suggests that by now any rational person who is not either deluded, naïve, or willfully ignorant must have come to accept the predictable free market catechisms and boilerplate apologies for corporate neoliberalism routinely penned by commentators like Thomas Friedman.

      Zakaria accuses protesters in Quebec of "misunderstanding" what he calls "basic economics," as though what is taught as "economics" in the American academy is some sort of genuine science, like geology or physics, instead of what most real scientists deem it to be: a partial, rather obviously ideological depiction of human society as viewed from the perspective of businesses and consumers. He fails even to gesture to the spate of denunciations of the neoliberal model issued recently by prominent business leaders like George Soros and high-ranking economic officials like former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz.  He completely ignores several recent economic studies