In Search of Steady Reform

Fareed Zakaria is a captain of the punditry industry. A longtime host of his own CNN show on international and domestic politics, a columnist at The Washington Post, and the author of best-selling books on current affairs, he seems to have been everywhere and read everything. Born in India of Muslim parents, educated at Yale and Harvard, and now hobnobbing with heads of state, he maintains just enough emotional distance from the United States to look at our internal divisions and external entanglements with a relatively cool eye. In Age of Revolutions Zakaria goes all the way back to the Netherlands in the 1500s to try to understand our contemporary situation, with its populist backlash, uncertainties about globalization, eye-popping changes in digital technology, and upending of the international political order as a result of the rise of China and the revanchism of Russia. Even without the historical background, this would be a daunting subject.

The disruptions in politics, economics, and technology make this a revolutionary time, Zakaria maintains, so examples from past revolutions should help illuminate our path. He aims to answer three main questions: “What makes a period revolutionary? Are there other predictable consequences of a revolutionary era? And how does it all end?” These questions sound straightforward, but examined more closely, they reveal questionable assumptions. Zakaria contends that we live in a revolutionary period, but we cannot be certain of this because we do not know what its trajectory will be. That Steve Bannon thinks we live in revolutionary times is hardly conclusive evidence.

If it is difficult to tell whether a period is revolutionary, then it is even more challenging to seek the “predictable consequences” of revolution. Zakaria offers his own version of earlier European revolutions, extracting their predictable consequences in the hope that they will help foretell how our present era of revolution will end. Many self-proclaimed revolutionaries looked back at earlier examples hoping to derive lessons from them: in the 1920s, for example, leading Bolsheviks such as Leon Trotsky worried that the Russian Revolution had entered its Thermidorean phase. Thermidor was the name of the month in the French revolutionary calendar for 1794 when Maximilien Robespierre and his followers fell from power and were executed, after which their radical innovations were rolled back, the economy was made more market-oriented, and the propertied classes were able to regain their influence.

Zakaria looks back for entirely different reasons. Rather than fearing the deterioration of revolutionary spirit, he singles out exemplary “liberal” revolutions that kept in check the most extreme revolutionary impulses. These revolutions embraced globalization, benefited from technological and financial innovations, shored up representative forms of government, and encouraged religious tolerance and diversity, all of which he wants to bolster in the present. He begins with the Dutch war for independence from Spain that began in 1566, because in the course of it the Dutch set up a republic and offered religious toleration. They also gained an advantage over their economic competitors by developing the best oceangoing ships and launching new forms of investment that were open to all, including a stock exchange and a Bank of Amsterdam that functioned much like a central bank.

Zakaria then moves on to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–1689, because “England had the right political ingredients for a liberalizing, modernizing revolution.” The parliamentary factions united to throw out King James II, who wanted to emulate French-style authoritarianism and restore Catholicism, and they invited to the throne James’s solidly Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, the Protestant head of the Dutch Republic. The couple agreed to make England a constitutional monarchy and promptly assented to a Bill of Rights and the Act of Toleration, which granted freedom of worship to Protestant dissenters from the Church of England. The English learned from the Dutch and leapt ahead of them, acquiring a taste for Chinese tea, building a naval arsenal with taxes on the consumption of global products, and establishing the Bank of England in 1694 to fund the state and stimulate investment. Meanwhile the Dutch rested on their laurels and lost their edge by the end of the seventeenth century.

Zakaria then seizes upon the French Revolution of 1789 as a counterexample to these liberal revolutions. In his recounting, it was extremist, violent, and based on “identity politics,” in this case a polarization between patriots and traitors. It failed because it was “imposed by political leaders, rather than growing naturally out of broad social, economic and technological changes,” as the Dutch and English ones had. The liberal constitutionalism of those like the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American War of Independence, gave way to the radical populism of Robespierre, whose repressive policies repelled even his allies. He and his followers thus paved the way for the nationalist authoritarianism of Napoleon Bonaparte. Taken as a whole, the French Revolution added up to “an unnecessary bloody detour from a steadier, reformist route to democracy and capitalism.”

This gets to the heart of the problem with Zakaria’s three main questions. He does not like radical revolutions because they do not take “a steadier, reformist route to democracy and capitalism.” Yet his Dutch and English examples are revolutionary only in the most minimal sense. The Dutch revolted to preserve their Calvinist way of life, and to achieve this they fought their Catholic Spanish overlords in what they themselves called, once it was over, the Eighty Years’ War—not exactly a brief cataclysmic event. They established a republic because a loose federation was the only way to get the various Dutch provinces to cooperate, and they allowed the private, not public, worship of any religion because some provinces still included many Catholics, Catholicism having been almost everyone’s religious identity before the Reformation of the early 1500s. (This toleration did, however, open the way in the 1590s and afterward for Jews fleeing persecution by the Spanish and Portuguese.) Democracy was out of the question; the oligarchy of rich merchants, manufacturers, and landholders dominated political decision-making until well into the 1800s.

The English “revolution” of 1688–1689 is even more questionable. It took a relatively nonviolent form because the English had had a radical revolution a generation before. In the civil wars of 1642–1660, King Charles I was defeated in battle, put on trial, and executed, and the monarchy was replaced by something resembling a republic of which Oliver Cromwell became the authoritarian Lord Protector—more authoritarian than Robespierre could ever hope to be. Events in 1688–1689 worked out differently because neither faction in Parliament wanted a repetition of those upheavals. The more relevant French comparison, then, would be with the Revolution of 1830, when, as in 1688–1689, one king was promptly replaced with another, constitutional government was assured, and religious toleration (first granted in 1789–1791) was reaffirmed. “Get rich” became the motto of the post-1830 regime. Might it be that violent revolution is sometimes necessary to prepare the ground for a steady, reformist route toward democracy?

Zakaria’s examples of previous political revolutions pale in comparison, however, with his “mother of all revolutions”: the industrial revolution that began in Britain, made the United States into a world power, and upended lives around the globe. Although he recognizes the downsides of industrialization, such as the exploitation of workers, including women and children, and environmental degradation, his view of its effects is resolutely positive. Its “ultimate consequence” was “to let humanity break free from the limits of biology” by devising machines to replace animal and human labor. Workers were eventually better off, and people yearned to move to the cities from the countryside to enjoy the benefits of new opportunities, despite crowded housing, unimaginably long workdays, and rampant infectious diseases.

In this account, as in Zakaria’s retelling of the Dutch, English, and French revolutions, slavery and colonialism hardly figure. The Dutch used their oceangoing technologies to outstrip their erstwhile Spanish masters in the transatlantic slave trade, though they soon found themselves eclipsed by the British in this, too. The Dutch seized colonial outposts from the Portuguese all over Asia and took control of what is now Indonesia, where they introduced coffee and had it grown by forced labor for consumption in Europe. Freedom at home did not translate to the colonies. The Dutch never had much of an abolitionist movement, in contrast to Britain, and only ended slavery in their colonies in 1863.

Similarly, the revolution of 1688–1689 coincided with a vast expansion of the British slave trade. Moreover, although it gained greater powers for Parliament and religious toleration for dissident Protestants in England, it only intensified the oppression of Catholics in Ireland. William personally commanded an army to defeat James and his Irish Catholic supporters, and in the ensuing reaction Irish Catholics were excluded not just from Parliament but from owning weapons, becoming lawyers or teachers, buying land, and sending their children abroad for education.

The connection between slavery, colonialism, and the industrial revolution remains a hotly debated topic. The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British were all avid colonizers and enthusiastic participants in the slave trade, yet only the British went on to invent steam-driven machinery that used coal to power both factories and the new means of transport, railroads. Zakaria makes much of the singularity of Britain, but he overlooks its dependence on US cotton and minimizes its distortion of the economy of India to suit its aims. The leaders of the Confederacy had every reason to hope that the British might support their secession from the United States, since in 1860 Britain imported 80 percent of its cotton from the southern slave states. With seeds purloined from China, the British set up tea plantations in Assam in northeastern India to counter Chinese dominance in the trade. They also sold Indian opium to the Chinese to improve the British balance of payments, and when the Chinese resisted, Britain waged two opium wars, in 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. At the same time they destroyed the domestic manufacture of cotton textiles in India with a system of tariffs favoring British manufacture. “Free trade” as the linchpin of globalization was free for some, not all.

Zakaria has an enviable ability to condense huge amounts of information and seize upon the most salient points, so it is regrettable that he often wears rose-tinted glasses when sifting through the evidence. “With the onset of industrial production and mechanized transport,” he maintains, “trade became more profitable than war.” He might have argued instead that industrialization made war much deadlier. If globalization “demonstrably improved the material living conditions of practically everyone in the world,” it did so at great cost to those who lost their jobs to outsourcing or found themselves virtual slave laborers in new factories. To be fair, however, Zakaria is most positive about free trade, industrialization, and globalization and less sanguine about the digital revolution, the changes in the global balance of power, and the rise of the new populism. The digital revolution has given us convenience and efficiency at the cost of “civic engagement, intimacy, and authenticity,” he concludes. In fact, he blames the digital revolution rather than globalization for most of our woes: it has fostered atomization, job losses, social resentment, and extremism.

Yet the real culprit, Zakaria claims, is identity politics, which he traces back to the Netherlands, whose people thought of themselves as Protestant and Dutch rather than distant subjects of a domineering Catholic empire. Technological and economic changes combine with identity politics, he argues, to create volatile new political alignments. In the good revolutions—the Dutch, the English, and the industrial revolutions—progress advances apace without too much disruption because identity politics give way to more pragmatic solutions such as religious toleration and the gradual inclusion of male workers in electoral politics. In the bad revolutions—the French Revolution, the rise of China and attempted revival of Russia, and the global populist surge—identity politics turn destructive. In France, self-proclaimed patriots silenced dissenters by guillotining them if necessary. Napoleon used nationalism to cement his power at home, but his wars of conquest inflamed national feeling throughout Europe, which poisoned international relations for decades. Vladimir Putin, then, is just the latest in a long line of populist nationalists who rail against alien (in this case, Western, secular, antipatriarchal, antimasculinist) influences in order to inflate their standing at home and justify their actions abroad. In the current populist surge, however, the polarization does not just pit the nation against outsiders; it divides the nation itself into irreconcilable parts.

In Zakaria’s usage, “identity politics” is a baggy term covering too many disparate manifestations. Black campaigns for civil rights and against police brutality, women’s demands for equality, and the LGBTQ movement are lumped together with sixteenth-century Dutch Protestants, eighteenth-century French patriots, anti-Catholic sentiment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, anti-immigrant crusades across the globe, and even China’s policy of favoring the Han ethnic majority. In other words, identity politics power both parts of Zakaria’s subtitle: progress and backlash. They can be a sign of social progress or an expression of backlash against that progress.

For Zakaria, progress always begins with economic and technological change. The “first identity revolution,” the Protestant Reformation, was made possible by the invention of the printing press. The post–World War II economic boom, “brought about by globalization and technological progress,” made possible “the most radical identity revolutions of the twentieth century.” In doing so, it also fostered a potentially unmanageable dialectic: “Formerly marginalized groups perceive the change as liberating and reach for newfound dignity; those at the top fear losing the status they already have.” Zakaria adroitly traces the ensuing “vicious cycle of political polarization” in the United States, but the parallels with Europe do not work as well. There immigration, particularly of Muslims, is the crucial issue, much more consequential than US culture-war conflicts such as the fight over abortion rights, the banning of books, or the labeling of public restrooms. In Europe, Muslim immigration can be cast, he admits, as undermining women’s and gay rights and secularism and not just as a threat to Christian or white ethnic identities. Immigration is an issue in the United States, too, but never because it threatens women’s or gay rights.

Although Zakaria recognizes the gains made by the various campaigns for rights since the 1960s, he comes close to blaming the magnitude of those changes for the backlash that followed. American civil rights legislation passes at the beginning of one paragraph, but by the end of it “race riots became commonplace.” Four students are killed in an anti–Vietnam War protest in another, and the following paragraph focuses on the rise of crime in the 1970s.

Similarly, the backlash against immigration seems predictable. The percentage of foreign-born people in the United States “nearly tripled to over 13 percent” between 1970 and 2016, an important fact that leaves out the equally important one that the percentage of foreign-born Americans was even higher in 1890, at nearly 15 percent. Zakaria wants readers to understand the fears felt by those who express fury about the effects of immigration, but he does not offer a solution. What we need, he says, is “an immigration regime that is seen by all as rules-based and fair.” This is easier said than done.

Zakaria’s focus on identity politics ultimately leads him astray. We should not be “seduced” by identity politics, he concludes, which are “fundamentally illiberal, viewing people as categories rather than individuals.” Yet he shows that sometimes people must come together to insist that their “category” needs to be taken seriously, granted rights long refused, and afforded dignity that has been denied. His own analysis points toward the necessity of understanding the identities of those who have felt denigrated in their turn by the changes that have taken place.

A dose of identity politics might have been useful in Zakaria’s consideration of his two big geopolitical threats of our time, Russia and China. Having made a strong argument for greater understanding of those who feel that globalization, modernization, and immigration are existential threats, he reverts to a categorical, us-versus-them analysis of international politics. The United States still exercises great influence in global politics, but it now navigates in a multipower world, and to achieve its aims, it must also concede status to its competitors. Zakaria may be right that Russia “faces a future of technological decay, economic stagnation, and diplomatic weakness as it increasingly becomes a vassal state of China,” but he could also be wrong, and in either case, recognition that Russia has reasons to feel aggrieved about NATO expansion might better prepare the way for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine.

China gets a more respectful scrutiny, if only because of its powerful economy and military, and Zakaria hopes that the US “can find a way to live in peaceful albeit energetic competition” with it. If he had had more to say about climate change and pandemics and the increasingly urgent problems they pose for everyone on the planet, he might have found more grounds for cooperation, not just between the United States and China but more generally in the world. For someone so invested in international conversation, it is surprising that most of the solutions Zakaria proposes are geared to a US audience. They are often thoughtful ones: universal national service to create a new sense of community; free preschool, subsidized childcare, and paid parental leave to strengthen family life; market regulation and a modicum of wealth redistribution; and a renewed emphasis on the free exchange of ideas in colleges and universities. These may be meant to indicate a steady, reformist route, but in the current circumstances, they sound almost revolutionary.