For the past few years, pundits and policymakers have made a living explaining why we are at the end times. With the left regularly predicting the end of liberal democracy and the right of moral virtue, we are living in an age that is pessimistic at best, reckless and dangerous at worst. Amid the hysterics, Fareed Zakaria may be the most influential voice that has consistently urged calm in the face of large-scale change. His new book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, offers a powerful defense of liberalism’s achievements and a caution to revolutionaries that Edmund Burke himself would endorse. The logic of Zakaria’s defense, however, devolves into an identification of liberalism with “progress” in such a way that appeals to salutary checks on liberalism are treated as reactionary and dangerous. His argument, accordingly, should be taken with some caution.

According to Zakaria, we are living in a revolutionary age, both in our domestic politics and in the world at large. Domestically, the traditional left-right divide is changing. For decades, the dividing line between left and right was economic in nature; conservatives wanted tax cuts, deregulation, and a smaller federal government whereas liberals wanted to preserve and expand a host of entitlement programs. Both, however, operated within a broad liberal framework that located the ends of government in the protection of individual rights. That is no longer the case. The divide now concerns the “open” versus “closed” societies where moral and ideational issues are more determinant of a person’s vote than tax cuts and spending. Internationally we are seeing a similar “revolution” against the US-backed liberal order uniting the world through free trade, collective action, and easy immigration. This revolution, led by an array of demagogues and populists, prefers tighter borders and national identity instead of globalism.

These revolutions are important and will shape politics well into the future. Accordingly, Zakaria counsels a historically informed deliberation. Should we wish to navigate the waters and arrive at a happy port where individual rights remain protected, economies thrive, and the rule of law prevails, we can and should heed lessons from the major revolutions humanity has undergone in the past four centuries, from the liberal revolution in Holland to the industrial revolution in the United States. Revolutions follow a predictable path: some large-scale change in technology or economics triggers a change in identity (how people understand themselves) which in turn demands a new style of politics. How leaders handle these demands determines whether a revolution will broadly improve affected people’s lives, or trigger chaos, blood, and stagnation. It is the difference between the bloodless Glorious Revolution in Britain and the Reign of Terror and the Bonaparte dynasty in France. In the former, leaders followed the organic, bottom-up, and liberal political trajectory of the people and middle class. In the latter, enlightened elites tried to force a rapid change on a backward, intensely traditional society to predictable results.

The United States today, and indeed much of the world, is undergoing a revolution whose effects will equal if not surpass those of the great revolutions in history. Since the end of the Cold War, sweeping economic and technological changes have triggered or catalyzed changes in identity. Traditional values, such as religious faith and the nuclear family, have largely given way to “post-material values” such as greater acceptance of sexual identities, decline in church attendance, and decline in marriage. For some, this seems a blessing. For others, it is psychologically disturbing and chaotic. As in times past, today’s rapid changes have spurred in many a desperate nostalgia for a past golden age along with vengeful resentment for those held responsible for the changes. Zakaria can sympathize with these reactions, but in the end, his book is a panegyric for liberalism in the face of this illiberal backlash. 

When discussing revolutions of the past and how to navigate today’s uncertainties, Zakaria sounds as though he were Burke’s twenty-first-century heir. Their similarities go deeper than their shared disdain for the French Revolution. Like Burke, Zakaria is a classical liberal easily mistaken for a man of the right. A Reaganite in the 1980s, he studied under conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington and wrote a best-selling book cautioning against democracy promotion abroad. His historic conservatism, much like his current book, however, has always been in the service of liberal ends. Rushed change, like coerced change, is rarely the friend of liberty. “Bottom-up” or “organic” liberalism encourages change while keeping men’s sanity.

This Burkean liberalism remains the most appropriate for our current revolution—in part because it encourages a certain sympathy for those most keen on destroying the liberal order. Make no mistake, this book is a caution against the various shades of post-liberalism. But Zakaria understands that certain problems do follow from the widespread loss of traditional mores and the community they fostered. There can be no solution to these problems if we cannot first sympathize with those who have lost the most. The Boomer white Christian in Iowa is not deplorable, but understandably upset by how quickly the country he knew as a child has changed. Zakaria has the good sense to see that these voters’ motivations go far deeper than simple racism or xenophobia. They are rooted in a human nature that dislikes change and is inclined to stability. Indeed, the widespread anger is a predictable backlash, expected in any society that has changed as rapidly and profoundly as ours has in the space of two generations.

Precisely because Zakaria can sympathize with the impulse towards nationalism, populism, and the like, his ire is not directed against the populists and the nationalists so much as the “friends of the Enlightenment project” who ought to have tempered change and resisted sirens’ songs masked as liberalism. In one passage, the usually cool and calm Zakaria reveals a certain frustration with these liberal elites:

Don’t succumb to hubris and believe that every theoretical advance in rights is pure virtue and should be implemented today. Don’t treat the nation as a guinea pig for your latest scheme. Don’t impose change from above. … Don’t give up on freedom of speech just because at any given moment you despise a message that is spreading far and wide. Don’t be seduced by identity politics—which is fundamentally illiberal.

Zakaria’s book is a welcomed addition to the debate concerning the crisis of liberalism. Of the popular works on the subject, his is among the most thoughtful, balanced, and prescriptive. But it is not without flaws. The most obvious is methodological. As one reviewer points out, Zakaria seems to be making two different arguments. On the one hand, he argues that revolutions can follow two different “plotlines.” The liberal revolution is “forward-looking” or a revolution as “radical advance.” These “liberal” revolutions seek to further and further liberate individuals from arbitrary barriers, be they political dictatorships or cultural forces like racism and misogyny. The illiberal revolution, by contrast, is reactionary, nostalgic, or a revolution as “returning to the past.”

Eventually, it becomes clear that this is not quite his argument. His major case selection for an illiberal revolution is France where revolutionaries were incredibly “forward-looking.” Zakaria’s argument seems to change halfway through the book to become explicitly more Burkean. “Forward-looking” liberal revolutions are helpful when they are gradual and anchored by a population that is itself liberal in habit and disposition. I agree with this argument, but the book at times feels confused about what precisely it is arguing.

There are, however, more substantial problems. Zakaria comes very close to adopting a quasi-Marxist interpretation of history where economic changes are the primary drivers of human fate. While he manages to leave some room for contingency in the individual decisions of leaders, he ignores the ability of ideology (rather than a vague nostalgia for the good ole days) to motivate massive numbers of people. Accordingly, Zakaria’s book on four hundred years of revolutions hardly mentions the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese Communist Revolution, or even the Iranian Revolution. Similarly, he severely downplays the importance of Enlightenment thought on the American Revolution, arguing that it was essentially an English assertion of English rights.

These are major omissions in part because they highlight how our responses to economic changes cannot be described simply as reactionary or forward-looking. They can take a variety of directions from utopian Marxism to resistance Shi’ism, where liberalism is one of many options available. The past four hundred years have not been the story of progress and backlash. The story is one where major changes are followed by a host of different interpretations and prescriptions, sometimes conservative, sometimes decidedly not, and often an incoherent blend of both. 

This is more than academic nitpicking. Categorizing viewpoints as either “forward-looking” or “backward” yields a parallel typology where political actors tend to be either “progressive” or “reactionary.” Prudent statesmen follow progress’s arc, controlling for excess as necessary; imprudent statesmen challenge this arc. Though Zakaria can sympathize with current critiques of liberalism, he cannot refrain from labeling “reactionary” every major political move away from the liberal order, from history’s order. Accordingly, he regards Brexit’s (admittedly) hasty withdrawal from the European Union as reactionary and “illiberal,” just as much as Victor Orban’s avowed illiberalism. 

In some ways, this problem stems from Zakaria’s Burkeanism itself. Just as Burke struggled to identify a clear standard for political conduct after appealing to history and organic development, Zakaria too struggles to offer clarity about when political leaders should run against the “organic” direction of their people. After spending two hundred pages explaining how relentless progress yielded a displaced collection of “deracinated yuppies,” Zakaria reaffirms his commitment to “progress” in a way that feels like a blasé incantation. He does not bother to examine or indicate when this progress should end—if it should at all. Should progress in the service of rights be followed to an extreme conclusion in a global homogenous state, so long as that change is gradual and so long as “rights” are protected? Possibly—Zakaria does not engage in this sort of speculation or argument even though it is precisely the destruction of the local and national in the face of the universal that so frightens today’s “reactionaries.”

These criticisms notwithstanding, Zakaria’s Burkean interpretation of revolutions past and present is a helpful guide for understanding the major upheavals humanity is currently facing and why liberalism broadly understood remains the most salutary option available. It would be improved by Zakaria’s recognizing that not all moves away from the 2000s consensus are simply retrograde. The cause of liberalism may well fail should its champions consider “illiberal” every appeal to local self-rule, national sentiment, and more traditional values. Indeed, Zakaria may well ask himself whether liberalism writ large does not do best when its excesses are tempered by these non-liberal bulwarks.