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.
