CNN Sunday morning commentator Fareed Zakaria has a fascinating new book out, entitled, “Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.” Fareed has always been one of my favorite political commentator types, along with Christiane Amanpour, since the time I encountered him directly speaking at a New Yorker festival a dozen years ago or more when his first book, “The Post American World,” came out.

Zakaria has a kind of refreshing combination of humility and laser-like focus on discerning the truth. It doesn’t mean he gets it right all the time, of course, and he has his regular battery of guests often with links to the Council on Foreign Relations that sometimes take issue with his assessments.

Recently, Zakaria got caught up unproductively in the debate over NBC’s swift dismissal, just weeks after hiring her, of the former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel under pressure of a massive protest of other commentators on that network that included some at MSNBC. Zakaria contended that the network should have kept her on as an indicator of a commitment to a better balance among Democrats and Republicans in opinionating.

But if well-meaning, Zakaria was flat wrong, and in ways that bely the fundamental, flawed premise in his new book, as well. In the introduction to his book, Zakaria explains that “all modern politics around the world has been characterized as a contest between the Left and the Right.”

Wrong. The Left-Right split, as the author actually explains later, was between sides of the French parliament in the late 1700s. But that is prior to the onset of a modern capitalist hegemony, and instead is the product of a feudal order.

Ironically, if you take that “Left-Right” horizontal filter off what Zakaria writes about in his otherwise quite useful book, one can see that with the onset of our capitalist last century and a half, roughly, the divisions among us are in fact now much more vertical than horizontal.

Actually it is ironic in this respect that Zakaria opens his book with a quotation from the Marx-Engels “Communist Manifesto” of the 1840s about the fluidity of history, about conditions which “melt away” such that “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”

Well, man’s inhumanity to man is far more accurately described as the result of tensions between the super-rich and the rest of us, we the average families.

In our current capitalist system, what defines our society is the utter demand that capital continue to grow, and when it runs into barriers to its unfettered growth, it shatters all real and perceived obstacles to its continued ascendancy.

In our current “modern” world, it is astounding how little this is appreciated or even acknowledged. The whole “Left-Right” thing is a massive dodge, a trick of deception aimed at deceiving and misdirecting us to identify and focus attention on false enemies.

Persons (like me) who attempt to point to the real social contradictions behind this facade are thoroughly denounced as communists and enemies of the capitalist state. Yet, conceding to this fiction serves no genuine social purpose to even the best of intending persons other than to contribute to the nasty game at hand.

Now, the choice is not in reality between the insatiable capitalists and communists, as brutal in their own right as they may be. We learned most recently from the four-term administration of FDR that there is a very happy alternative, which is to balance capital and labor, if we want to call those alternatives by those names, to the enormous benefit of us all.

There can be no doubt that the Biden administration is steeped in that approach and making huge beneficial gains for the American people by way of it.

What was wrong with NBC’s hiring of McDaniel is that she, like Trump, is not part of that matrix at all. She is from the fringe world of Steve “Burn It All Down” Bannon, not a real Republican player in our system, but a wild anarchist who peddles lies to gain political advantage.

Zakaria should have known better.