Fareed Zakaria’s book is a defense of liberalism in the European sense — limited government, free markets, the rule of law, moral indifference, maximum freedom, and endless progress — and he turns all those who support conservatism into bitter racists who have been left behind by progress.
Age of Revolution: Progress and Reaction from 1600 to the Present, by Fareed Zakaria (400 pages, WW Norton & Company, 2024)
Some books can give you the impression that everything is the other way around: the author asserts as true all the assertions that you assert are false, and you read as negative the sequence of events that the author sees as positive.
Fareed Zakaria’s The Age of Revolution: Progress and Reaction from 1600 to the Present is one such book. To anyone bound by tradition, it reads as wrong from start to finish. That’s the only way to describe it.
This book is a defense of liberalism in the European sense: a regime of limited government, free markets, the rule of law, moral disinterest, maximum freedom, and endless progress. The author, a Washington Post columnist, seeks to explain how this great Enlightenment experiment failed and what it will take to keep it alive.
Keeping score
His take on the current crisis is that everything has been going well so far. The problem is that, especially now, various backlashes are ruining everything. He blames conservatives throughout history, who have fallen prey to fear and nostalgia, for their inability to adapt to changing times.
He also criticizes liberals for trying to push the revolutionary process too quickly: they should soften their rhetoric but not change their goals.
No matter who keeps the score, the left ultimately wins, and the right should be content to be the good loser by following “history” instead of “science.”
Continued in “History”
Zakaria’s book is a “history” – a scholarly and compelling collection of facts that support his simple and rather standard interpretation of modern history.
In fact, he presents “two competing scripts: liberalism, which means revolution in the sense of progress, growth, disruption, and radical advance; and illiberalism, which means revolution in the sense of regression, restriction, nostalgia, and a return to the past.”
That is it. There is nothing else. There is no going back. There is only forward movement. There are no principles to be followed, no restrictive traditions to be maintained. The only issue to be determined is the level of violence of the coming upheaval.
To illustrate his point, Zakaria outlines a repeating cycle of these two competing threads applied to historical events, or “history.” He breaks down modern history into four major revolutions: the Dutch Commercial Revolution (1588), the English Glorious Revolution (1688), the bloody French Revolution (1789), and the Industrial Revolution. Each revolution had its radical advances and major backlashes, but with the exception of the French Revolution, things ended well, all things considered.
So he places the current issue in the context of this cycle, and if conservatives lose well, this, too, should end well.
Simple and fatalistic
There are three errors in the author’s interpretation of history.
First, it is naively fatalistic. Like many contemporary writers, Mr. Zakaria has a Hegelian fatalism that dominates the historical process, calling for endless progress through struggle.
Progress, for him, means a greater state of what he believes to be freedom and equality. Thus the backlash is against abortion and the LGBTQ agenda, and it is about promoting the traditional family and marriage. These are inconvenient disruptions that must be overcome over time. They must be suppressed, not because they are right or wrong, but because the process demands it.
His explanation for the current crisis must therefore follow the narrative he has constructed. The author dismantles other narratives to fit into this distorted framework, ignoring, for example, legitimate assessments of Christendom and the progress of the West. There is no attempt to insert morality or any other considerations into the equation, because in the end it is all about the manipulation of power.
The Prism of Power and Money
The second problem with the book is that it portrays history as a manifestation of power and money. This shows a misunderstanding of what motivates individuals. The Marxist understanding of reality is through the prism of economics. Thus, Zakaria follows the Marxist method in his analysis. He tends to downplay factors such as religion in history. God is left out of history only as a human construct that supports power structures.
Everything is reduced to naked selfishness. For those who are driven by lofty aims like religion, this perspective makes the book seem very paradoxical. The spiritual side of the soul is ignored. And all that is good and true and beautiful springs from the lofty side.
Forced narrative
One of the strengths of this book is that it clearly lays out what the liberal left thinks about the right: the left has created its own narrative about the right, and Zakaria reproduces it with near-textbook accuracy.
He turns all conservatives into resentful racists who have been left behind by progress, who no longer belong to the racial class that once held so many privileges and who now resist progress, and who therefore cling to the remnants of power in religion, old morality, populism, and a “deplorable” identity that manifests itself in guns.
His distorted portrayal is almost convincing to anyone except the countless conservatives who don’t want to fit into this restrictive narrative. These Americans who fight for moral principles are infuriated to see their selfless defense of family values and love of God reduced to fiction in this crude portrayal of class warfare.
Liberalism in Crisis
Perhaps one of the best things about this book is its admission that liberalism is in grave crisis. It is experiencing one of the greatest backlashes in its history, precipitated by an unexpected response to the aggressive woke absurdity of today’s culture wars. The left is afraid of those who resist.
His aim is to calm the public by asserting that these revolutions have weathered other storms before. Like all liberals, he recommends more liberalism as the solution, even if applied moderately. He assures his readers that if liberals stay the course and act moderately, the process will win out in the end, as it has done before.
But beneath the surface, Zacharias has some doubts about the liberal cause: He acknowledges that “its rational project seems to many to be a poor substitute for the reverence for God that once drove men to build cathedrals and write symphonies.”
Liberalism leaves a vacuum of community, loyalty and meaning that cannot be filled, but Zakaria is quick to point out that neither populism nor illiberalism can fill it.
Certainly, he is right: these postmodern alternatives will fail because they are the product of liberalism, not its opposite. They suffer from the same lack of substance.
An appeal to permanence
What is needed is something that appeals to a supreme power, a higher law, and transcendent values that liberalism officially denies, a system of values that exists outside the sterile liberal world and that will soar the soul into a more wonderful realm.
Certainly, what Russell Kirk calls “the eternal things” — norms of courage, duty, decency, justice, and charity — exist and are authorized by a power higher than the marketplace, a transcendent God. These eternal things, and many others, once they take root in Christian civilization, will ultimately triumph.
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Featured image is “Episode La révolution de 1830” (1830) by Adele Kindt and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
