Age of Revolutions by Fareed Zakaria

Trying to cover 5 centuries in just over 300 pages is no small feat, but it’s something Fareed Zakaria has managed to do quite well. The focus of the book is entirely on the western world when looking at the past, but gives plenty of attention to Asia when looking at the present. The first half looks at the distant past while the second half looks at the recent past and the present. All in all, it’s a good read and easy to follow and understand.

Zakaria is someone I have long thought well of. He is best known for hosting “GPS” on CNN, which airs on Sunday mornings. I don’t recommend watching cable news, but if you insist on it, I do recommend watching him. He discusses important matters, foreign and domestic, and usually has very good guests. In addition to his show, Zakaria also writes an op-ed column for the Washington Post.

The book looks at different revolutions, literal and metaphoric, and lays out what Zakaria believes are successful examples and one very unsuccessful example. He first begins by discussing the Netherlands and the prosperous economy it enjoyed for some time. He then looks at the Glorious Revolution in England, which, like the Netherlands, he calls a success. Both countries experienced changes in their economic and social orders, but managed to not fall victim to radical revolutionaries.

A theme of the book is that top down approaches are most likely to generate backlashes because they involve a small group of people imposing large-scale changes on a populace that isn’t ready for it. The French Revolution is the example used for how what starts off as a noble venture can quickly go off the rails. France saw its entire political system burned down overnight but lacked the requisite institutions and public support to move forward with what was being created in its place. After 20 years of bloodshed and war, France wound up right back where it started with another King Louis.

What distinguished England and the Netherlands from France was having a comparatively decentralized system in place. Neither had a feudal system like France did. When England saw a change in leadership, the institutions were already in place and public support was there. For most people, their lives continued as they had before.

While political revolutions are a big deal, Zakaria argues that the biggest deal was the Industrial Revolution. Looking back, it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t the most consequential economic event in human history. Not only did it have big economic effects, but its political effects were equally big. Economies changed from being agrarian to industrial, which saw big changes in where people live and the kinds of jobs they had. On the political front, it was during the Industrial Revolution when ideologies from laissez-faire to communism first appeared.

Industrialization brought many benefits, but was very disruptive and produced a backlash. That’s what the book is trying to chronicle more than anything else. Over the course of many centuries, particularly since the Industrial Revolution, there have been periods of progress and backlash. Places have seen rapid changes that bring benefits, but also leave many people feeling alienated.

The contrast, Zakaria says, is between those who embrace progress and those who wish to see it undone. He is firmly in favor of the side of embracing progress, change and technology. However, he argues that there are plenty who are displaced by those things and feel like they’ve lost something. The challenge is to address their concerns while not trying to prevent things from moving forward.

Right now, we’re seeing populist movements all over the world, but such movements aren’t new. As long as there have been big changes in society, there have been movements pushing against it. The first ever populist movement was in the US in the 1890s. Populist movements are not monolithic and can have widely divergent goals. There are a few common denominators, though.

One is anger at “elites” and having ready-made villains to rail against. Another is proposing simplistic solutions. Often times, populists will preach nostalgia for a past that never existed. What they play into is feelings that people have lost something they hold dear.

Populism has already had a big impact in the US and abroad. Here, it has firmly remade the Republican Party into a personality cult while destroying the previously held consensus that free trade is good. Protectionism was once disdained by both parties, but now is a key part of Trump’s platform and Biden has embraced it as well, albeit to a smaller degree.

In Europe, populism has had an arguably bigger effect. England voted to leave the EU in 2016. In France, the far-right National Rally looks poised to have the most seats in parliament although not a majority. Other countries have seen right-wing populists thrive, including Italy and the Netherlands. What populists in Europe share in common is a disdain for immigration. There are also left-wing populist parties, but so far they have not been nearly as effective as their right-wing counterparts. Often times, it's hard to tell the difference between them.

Zakaria is very much in the liberal tradition. By liberal, he means it in the classical sense, not left-wing politics. Liberalism has traditionally entailed promoting individual rights on social and economic issues. It has advocated for equality of opportunity and rights such as free speech and a free press along with an independent judiciary and free and fair elections. Like Zakaria, I am firmly in the liberal tradition.

Liberalism has done many great things and is worth fighting for. It embraces progress, is forward looking and doesn’t claim to have all the answers. In fact, liberalism is entirely about process, not outcomes. The idea is to, within certain confines, let people be free and choose for themselves what they wish to do in life.

The problem for liberalism is it can seem unfulfilling as it doesn’t offer definitive moral judgments. Populists claim to have the answers and offer simple solutions to complex, multidimensional problems. In their telling, there are certain villains who must be defeated and once that happens everything will be great. The problem with that is it’s pure fantasy at best and otherwise turns very ugly very fast.

While liberalism isn’t without flaws, it is right about many things and has helped advance human welfare like no other idea. The advancement of individual rights has substantially improved the lives of groups who had nothing for almost their entire existence. The advancement of ideas like a market economy has led to more prosperity than anything else. But it is true that those things can have rough edges and that needs to be addressed.

Globalization has brought about many good things, for example, but it’s not cost-free. Many people have lost jobs and many once thriving places are now struggling. People who live in those areas often feel like they’ve been forgotten and nobody cares about them. It’s not clear what the solution is to their feelings of alienation, but somehow liberalism and its defenders need to find an answer.

I wish I knew what that was, but I don’t. There are many policy ideas I think would help, but that only goes so far. The polarization that the US has is mostly not about policy, but culture and identity. Zakaria argues forcefully against identity politics and chronicles its long history of being responsible for many wars and other atrocities. Liberalism is an effort to move away from identity labels and promote individualism. Ideologies like populism and nationalism are the opposite.

It’s not just liberalism that is being challenged, but the international rules-based order, too. Zakaria is a forceful defender of it and so am I. The international arrangement that has prevailed since 1945 has been US-led, is highly unusual and has been extremely successful. Just look at European history prior to 1945. It’s hard to find a period where there wasn’t a war going on. From 1945-2022, there were no major land wars there.

That didn’t happen randomly. Organizations like NATO and the EU were vital to it. Previously, countries would go to war, but by trading with each other their economies became interdependent and much more integrated. War became a very unattractive option. NATO brought together allied countries to fight against communism and to promote liberal values with much success.

The world since the creation of the rules-based order has been vastly more peaceful and prosperous. However, as Zakaria notes, it was largely an order that applied to western, developed countries. China and Russia never saw it as something to abide by.

Putin and Xi are the biggest challenges to the international rules-based order. Zakaria says that was inevitable and it’s hard to argue otherwise. There was a period from the 1990s until the early 2010s where the US was the sole major power. That is over and was never going to last. China was not going to stay poor forever and Russia was never going to go the way of other formerly communist countries that have embraced markets and democracy.

As Zakaria notes, Putin and Xi yearn for the past, like so many other populist movements. Putin wants to recreate the USSR while Xi wants to be Mao. Both hate western values such as democracy and the freedoms that come with it. While they aren’t spreading an alternative ideology, they are aligned together against the US and are aiming to combat its influence.

While China’s rise and Russia’s return were inevitable, the US has made mistakes since the 1990s. Most notably, invading Iraq was an unmitigated disaster. The only valid reason for it turned out to be false and the US military, despite its many strengths, couldn’t quell the insurgency that followed after Saddam Hussein was toppled. With 21 years to look back at, I’m convinced that the worst part of invading Iraq was the destabilization it caused throughout the region.

Hussein was one of the worst people on earth. He was also a check on Iran, which is home to a terrible regime that’s a long time US enemy. By removing him, Iran lost its biggest enemy without having to do anything. The refugee crisis that began last decade is directly because of the instability in Iraq overflowing into Syria and elsewhere. Many of those refugees have understandably tried to flee.

That has created many problems in Europe as it has brought in millions of people very quickly. The huge influx of refugees has arguably aided far-right parties more than any single development. Basically, you can trace much of the rise of the far-right in Europe to the decision to invade Iraq.

Invading Iraq was a choice. It didn’t have to happen. But the other event that has damaged US credibility abroad was all but impossible to foresee completely and that was the financial crisis. The near collapse of the banking system, followed by the slow recovery, shattered the belief that the US economy had it all figured out and was the system to emulate.

Given that the international rules-based order and liberalism in general are being challenged like never before, what is to be done? Zakaria discusses a few things in the last couple of pages, but is purposefully broad. He says in the book that his goal is to chronicle and explain what is going on, not to prescribe solutions.

That can be frustrating, but it’s understandable. There is no single answer for what to do nor is it obvious what will work. I think, looking at it from 30,000 feet, that the best solutions to disruptive events like globalization are to enact moderate reforms to smooth its rough edges. That has been done before, as Zakaria notes, in England where reforms were made in the 1800s to improve the lives of workers and to give more people the right to vote.

As for how to combat China and Russia, Zakaria is a forceful advocate of aiding Ukraine. Beyond that, it’s not clear what he thinks should be done. I have written on those subjects before, but I’m definitely not an authority on the matter. All I can say is dealing with China is going to be the biggest foreign policy task for the US and allied countries for decades to come.

On the domestic front, I want to preserve the market-oriented economy we have and don’t want to have a statist, protectionist regime and hope other western countries do the same. But to do that, the costs will need to be addressed somehow. What worries me, though, is that the cure for the populist urges being felt may not be preventive. I would love to think that people can see demagogues selling snake oil, but that would be hopelessly naïve. The fact that there are people who want to put Trump in charge again after he tried to overturn an election is all the evidence you need to know that that idea is false.

In Europe, it’s not looking great either. There could very well be some far-right governments soon enough. We could see President Marine Le Pen in 2027 and other countries ruled by similar people.

The far-right did a lot damage in Europe not terribly long ago, but it’s ancient history now. Hardly anyone today was around for Hitler and Mussolini. To be clear, I don’t think the far-right today is anywhere near as bad as the Nazis, but their economic ideas, if implemented, would wreak havoc. I’m afraid that’s what might have to happen. The far-right may not be prevented from taking power. People just might have to learn the hard way. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.

Populists have no solutions to any of the problems their countries are facing. They offer rage, emotion and simplistic stories where there’s a cartoonish villain. That’s why Zakaria believes liberalism, even though it can be unsatisfactory at times, is unlikely to be replaced by populism. I think that’s right, but, like I said, we might have to learn the hard way as we’re really not good at preventive measures.

While Zakaria doesn’t directly say this, I think he gets close to touching on something I have been thinking about for a while when it comes to explaining the rise of populist movements in the US and abroad. A common explanation is it’s because of economic anxiety. The idea is basically populism is a working-class revolt. Working-class people have lost jobs and are subject to competition from immigrants while everyone else is ignoring them.

As with all sweeping explanations, you can find grains of truth to it. But that doesn’t explain it all. For example, why did so many business people in the UK support Brexit even though they were doing very well? The same is true in the US. Trump made inroads with working-class voters, but there are plenty of middle and upper class people who support him.

Cultural explanations are plentiful and in the US partisanship is very strong so people tend to vote with their party no matter what. That, too, has some truth to it, but I think it’s more fundamental than any of that. It goes to the heart of who we are as a specie.

I think people are just bored. We need an epic struggle between good and evil. This was a point made by Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History. People need some kind of struggle, something to fight against. For a little bit, that great evil was fascism.

After fascism, the great evil was communism. That lasted a lot longer, but it, too, was defeated. In the 2000s, it looked like Jihadism would be the new great evil, but it was never anything like Nazi Germany or the USSR. Al-Qaeda and the like have no large military and have very little influence outside of the Middle East. Nobody seriously thought sharia law was going to take over the west.

Democratic capitalism has become a victim of its own success. It has won out and now has no great evil to compete with. But people need a great evil to fight against and so that has now become the very system and institutions that have enabled peace and prosperity since 1945. The villain now is democracy and market economies and their institutions like NATO and the EU.

In a way, we’ve become spoiled. The US has never had an authoritarian government. Western Europe hasn’t had such a government in decades. Few people in the developed world today know what it’s like to have freedom completely taken away. That has convinced people that it’s okay to elect populist authoritarians either because “It can’t happen here” or “The system sucks for reasons I can’t explain, burn it all down!” It’s easy to believe that when you’ve never had to live with the consequences of it.

It’s as if every few generations there has to be some kind of self-inflicted crisis just to remind us that, yes, bad things can still happen. At least that is my theory. I’m not a scholar so don’t take any of that as gospel. I have no idea how the boredom hypothesis, for lack of a better phrase, could even be proven or debunked. Maybe someone is working on it, but it’s not me and I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to do it.

After all that gloom, I would like to end on a more hopeful note. Zakaria is ultimately optimistic that liberalism will prevail because it offers so many benefits that people really want even if they complain about its side effects. People want to be free and care about being able to choose their own government even if they have to go through some terrible times to realize it.

I think that’s right. Democracy and market economies have a lot going in their favor. Populists offer simple solutions, but ultimately, when the rubber hits the road, the emperor has no clothes. We may have to go through some bad periods to see that, but populism will be discredited.

In the end, people want good results and will judge their leaders based on that. Populists have it easy because few of them have ever had any responsibilities. If given the chance to enact what they want, it will become clear between liberalism and populism which one is far better. That’s why I believe liberalism will be vindicated yet again even if takes some needless pain to get there.