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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FAREED ZAKARIA’S SPEED DATE WITH THE LIBERAL WORLD ORDER  
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Tim Wu
March 26, 2024
The New York Times
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_ In “Age of Revolutions,” the CNN host promises to shed light on
four centuries of social upheavals and to offer insights on the global
fractures of the present. _

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Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present
Fareed Zakaria
Norton
ISBN-13: 978-0393239232

Covering 424 years of revolutions in a couple hundred pages is an
ambitious undertaking. That is nonetheless what Fareed Zakaria, the
Washington Post foreign affairs columnist and CNN host, seeks to do in
“Age of Revolutions,” a chronicle of the civil upheavals that have
led societies around the world to seek new kinds of politics.

By one scholarly count
[[link removed](revolutions%20and%20their%20analogues)%20in%20the%2020th%20century.%20According%20to%20our%20estimates%2C%20the%20number%20of%20classic%20revolutions%20in%20the%2019th%20century%20is%20no%20more%20than%2040%E2%80%9345.]
there have been more than 160 major revolutions over just the last two
centuries alone — so what to cover? Zakaria solves that problem the
old-fashioned way, by writing mainly about Britain, the United States
and France (Holland has a cameo).

Consequently, while the book opens with a quote from “The Communist
Manifesto,” some readers might be surprised to find that the
communist revolutions are not part of this history of revolution. Nor,
for that matter, is the Haitian slave rebellion, Mahatma Gandhi’s
anticolonial independence movement or any of the fascist takeovers.

There are some advantages to this approach. It gives Zakaria, a lively
writer and good storyteller, room for amusing asides — Robespierre
standing atop a plaster mountain in a feathered sash, trying
desperately to promote his deistic cult of the Supreme Being; Britain
debuting its first intercity train in 1830, an event that was marred
when a legislator who had championed the train was run over by it.

Zakaria justifies his narrow geographical scope by suggesting that the
legacy of a few major political and economic revolutions in the West
forms a “master narrative” that can explain societal change
elsewhere. But it is just weird to read a history of revolutions that
barely mentions Vladimir Lenin.

The omission is even stranger, because “Age of Revolutions”
implicitly adopts the Marxist view that material economic change
drives history from the similarly titled “The Age of Revolution,”
by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm. Case in point: Zakaria skips
the American Revolution, which he argues did little to “transform
society’s deeper structures,” and focuses instead on the first and
second Industrial Revolutions, in Britain and the United States.

Focus can be fruitful. It might show, for instance, how new economic
realities (advances in navigation technology made global trade easier)
change who can most easily accrue power (merchants). But Zakaria also
wants his history to serve as an explicit guide to present-day
challenges, and that’s where he runs into some trouble.

Zakaria is most interested in the apparent retreat of classical
liberalism in the face of “illiberal forces” now spreading through
countries like Hungary and Brazil. The key to reversing this trend, he
says, lies in understanding what motivates revolutions. His history
runs on two kinds of revolutionary “plotlines,” one founded in
liberalism and the other in illiberalism. Liberalism is propelled by
“progress, growth, disruption, _revolution in the sense of radical
advance_,” and illiberalism feeds on “regression, restriction,
nostalgia, _revolution in the sense of returning to the past_.”

When it comes to the actual history, however, Zakaria’s simple
distinctions collapse. The French revolutionaries were
forward-thinking: They sought progress, growth and disruption. But
Zakaria suggests that their revolution was ultimately “illiberal,”
partly because its ideals were imposed from above and abstract, a
hidden sand trap he introduces, apparently to keep the Terror off the
liberal side of the scoreboard.

In contrast, Zakaria’s enthusiasm for the 1688 Glorious Revolution
in England is boundless. Was this a liberal revolution? It was
certainly less of a “radical advance” than Oliver Cromwell’s
republican revolution, which preceded it by three decades, and, while
it did return lost powers to Parliament, the main goal was the
re-establishment of the Protestant throne. Any revolution seeking the
restoration of a prior religious order must involve some fond backward
glances at the past. In most ways, Zakaria is more of a conservative,
in the sense of Edmund Burke, than what he calls a liberal. As he
writes later on, “religion, tradition, community” served as
“ballasts in the storm of change” and prevented “communist or
fascist revolutions in places like Britain and America.”

Zakaria’s real preference is for slow, moderate revolts, preferably
of the Anglo-American Protestant variety. But this inclination is
exclusive to his treatment of political revolutions; he is quite
forgiving of radical economic change, even when the result is mass
suffering. “While the workers of industrial Britain were exploited
and poorly treated,” he argues, “they were still doing far better
in material terms than their ancestors, or even their parents.”

After skipping through the 400 years of revolution that got us here,
the second half of the book pivots into chapters on what Zakaria calls
the “revolutions present,” namely, “globalization,”
“technology,” “tribalism” and the post-Cold War wane of the
“Pax Americana.”

If the first part of the book was a speed date, the second part is a
drive-by. Zakaria covers globalization from the 1870s through today in
34 pages. The “technology” chapter spends a page on the 1830s,
jumps to the ’90s and then to social media, ChatGPT and CRISPR.
Somewhere in this whirlwind the promised development of a coherent
theory of revolution is abandoned in favor of running political
commentary, with China and Russia introduced as the modern-day
champions of illiberalism, threatening to end American supremacy. Yet
without any account of communism’s rise and fall, they arrive
onstage as last-minute villains cast in a poorly thought-out play.

The book culminates in a plea to better appreciate the merits of
global liberalism, offering a more emotionally wrought echo of Francis
Fukuyama’s recent “Liberalism and Its Discontents
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Like the doctor who thinks the problem is in your head, Zakaria
suggests that, in the West, we suffer from problems of attitude.
“Liberalism’s problem in many ways is that it has been too
successful.” Freedom creates anxiety, he says, and we crave an
escape. Hence the rise of identity politics and nationalism to fill
the void in our collective souls.

As Hobsbawm wrote, the study of revolution can tell us “how and why
the world has come to be what it is today and whither it is going.”
There is a case to be made, as Fukuyama does, for holding onto
political liberalism despite its many failings. But history and
political analysis are forced into a shotgun marriage in “Age of
Revolutions.” Zakaria warns against revolutions that move too fast
and displace too many people; it now seems that’s exactly what went
wrong in the last 40 years with the rise of the global economy.

* world history
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* history of revolutions
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