A beautiful mind made for our complicated times

He’s the new glamour boy of the national media. Bestselling author. Columnist for Newsweek magazine. Editor of Newsweek International. Regular guest on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

New York magazine last month described him as “silky and unflappable,” “dimple-chinned, with expressive eyebrows” and said he could be both “the Indian incarnation of Cary Grant” and “the first Muslim secretary of State.”

There’s only one problem with this panting adulation.

“I’m not really all that interesting,” says Fareed Zakaria. “I’m not rich. I’m not that famous. I’m not that glamorous. I have two kids under the age of 4, and when I’m not working, I’m hanging out with my family. When I read about myself, I say, ‘Sounds like a fascinating guy. I’d love to know him.’ But it isn’t quite me.”

Zakaria’s seeming modesty is part of his charm. But it isn’t his charm, his good looks or his journalistic ubiquity that have made him a media star, still eight months shy of his 40th birthday.

It’s his mind.

At a time when political discourse seems increasingly polarized, superficial and confrontational, Zakaria’s thoughtful analyses are original, carefully modulated, difficult to pigeonhole on the traditional ideological spectrum -- and accessible to open minds of all ages.

Zakaria was in Los Angeles recently to address students at Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood as part of the school’s Brown Family Speaker Series. Through several sessions, in a variety of settings, the high school students’ response was universally enthusiastic -- indeed rapt.Older, less impressionable minds have found themselves equally riveted.

Zakaria doesn’t speak in sound bites or epithets, and it’s difficult, in the space allotted to a newspaper column, to capture either his thought processes or his ability to articulate his positions. But as Mark Whitaker, the editor of Newsweek, says, “Fareed has a clear sense of the issues and he can talk about them and write about them in a nonfussy, nonpedantic way.”

Making it clear

Zakaria first came to national prominence three weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when he wrote a 7,000-word cover story for Newsweek titled “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?”

His answer:

Islamic countries had imported elements of our culture -- “Cadillacs, Gulfstreams and McDonald’s” -- but they had found it far more “difficult and dangerous” to import what he called “the inner stuffings of modern society -- a free market, political parties, accountability and the rule of law.”

“The Arab world is a political desert with no real political parties, no free press, few pathways for dissent,” he wrote. “As a result, the mosque turned into the place to discuss politics.

“If there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism,” he wrote, “it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world.”

That’s why, Zakaria says, “Islam became the language of political opposition. At first, most of the people who became terrorists tried to overturn their own regimes -- in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan.... But it’s tough to do that under a dictatorship. The U.S., as a free, democratic society, is a much softer target.

“Bin Laden’s genius,” Zakaria says, “was that he said, ‘Stop worrying about your own countries, and let’s attack the head of the snake -- the United States -- because it supports all those regimes you dislike.’ ”

Zakaria arguments have been widely quoted -- in part, no doubt, because he is a Muslim, “someone able to take readers inside these cultures and make what they did seem more understandable, without saying it was OK,” as he puts it.

Whitaker says Zakaria’s Newsweek story “had more impact than any analytical piece I can remember” -- and that’s just what he was looking for when he hired Zakaria after reading a book review he’d written in the New Republic.

Zakaria was 18 when he came to the United States from India. He studied at Yale and went to graduate school at Harvard, but even though he’d had summer internships at various magazines, he never really thought of himself as a journalist.

“I probably aspired to the role of public intellectual ... an academic and a writer of sorts,” he says, “but I hadn’t thought about where that would be.”

Then, in his final semester at Harvard, he had lunch with a friend who suggested he apply for the job of editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. He got the job and he was off and writing -- insightfully and provocatively.

When Zakaria and I had breakfast recently, I asked how he felt about some journalists’ characterization of him as a Reaganite conservative. He said that had been true when he was in college, “but the spectrum has shifted so much that I’m really a centrist. I’m generally in favor of low taxes, for example, but I don’t think a big tax cut now is a good idea.”

Similarly, while Zakaria strongly supports President Bush’s decision to attack Iraq, he’s used such phrases as “diplomatic hypocrisy” and “disaster” to describe the administration’s prewar foreign policy, and he’s critical of the “carte blanche” the government now has to monitor potential terrorist activity in the United States. He also thinks Bush “has an allergy to the United Nations” and is sacrificing U.S. credibility by not allowing U.N. inspectors to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq now.

Zakaria is equally critical of the news media, saying they were “insufficiently skeptical” and didn’t press the administration hard enough to “define the nature of the shadowy, nebulous threat” the administration invoked to justify the war.

“I’m socially liberal and often find myself out of sync with what the conservative establishment believes,” Zakaria says, but he’s less concerned with labels and litmus tests than with “the lack of any space in today’s climate for people who think through problems without regard to where they wind up on the political spectrum.”

Democracy and capitalism

In his book, “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad,” Zakaria argues that in trying to export democracy to other countries, the United States has often mistakenly equated democracy with free elections, whereas he thinks both capitalism and order must come first.

“After all,” as he points out, “Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany through free elections.”

Capitalism, Zakaria says, “embodies the concept of individual property rights,” and that requires the rule of law and judges to interpret the laws. He’s skeptical about the ability of a country with an oil-based economy to follow that paradigm. “If you have treasure in the ground, you don’t have to create those kinds of structures aboveground, so you don’t get political candidates who have to campaign on health care or tax cuts. With no real issues, you wind up electing thugs who just say, ‘Trust us -- we’ll take care of you.’ ”

As Zakaria wrote last month in another Newsweek cover story, “How to Wage the Peace,” adapted from his book: “Easy money means a government doesn’t have to tax its people.... When a government takes money from its people, the people demand something in return ... eventually, democracy. This bargain, between taxation and representation, is at the heart of Western liberty.”

Zakaria’s “taxation without representation” argument clearly resonated, not only with Newsweek readers but with the students at Harvard-Westlake, most of whom had studied that issue more recently than most of the rest of us.

As Thomas Hudnut, the school’s headmaster, said after Zakaria’s presentation at a campus-wide assembly:

“When was the last time you saw 850 kids sit so quiet for an hour that you could hear a pin drop? This shows what happens when you talk up to students, instead of talking down to them.”

The same, I think, could be said of adult audiences. The success of screaming heads on television notwithstanding, I think Zakaria’s emergence demonstrates that there’s a genuine hunger in the American public for intelligent, articulate commentary on world events.

If Bill O’Reilly, Chris Mathews and their loud-mouthed ilk would just shut up a few minutes, maybe we could hear it.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.