Fareed Zakaria explores how periods of rapid economic and technological change often unleash cultural anxiety and political backlash. In Age of Revolutions, he weaves together centuries of global upheaval to explain today’s populist revolts against liberal modernity.
Fareed Zakaria, a well-known international journalist, political commentator and author, was inspired to write Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present by the emergence in 2009 of the Tea Party, a conservative populist social and political movement within the US Republican Party. Its main concerns were not economic, but cultural, namely issues like immigration, multiculturalism, diversity, and assimilation.
Then the US came out of the Great Recession caused by the 2008/09 financial crisis better than any other country. But despite this rising economic tide, President Barack Obama’s approval ratings flatlined, contrary to the historic tight fit between the economy and the presidential approval ratings. Zakaria concluded that some things are happening that can’t be explained by normal politics. His fears were confirmed by Brexit and the presidential election victory of Donald Trump in 2016.
Zakaria’s thesis is that periods of extraordinary economic and technological change can result in the upending of culture, identity, and the fabric of society, and lead to a political backlash. To sketch a framework for his argument he explores these issues in five historic cases, namely: the Netherlands which gave birth to the first liberal revolution around the year 1600; the Glorious Revolution in England, which borrowed much from the Netherlands; France’s failed revolution; and the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the US.
Perhaps the most interesting case is that of the Netherlands, which basically created modern globalisation by inventing tall ships and navigation, joint stock companies and stock markets, and land and water management. This plucky country became the richest in the world in terms of income per person. Then the Dutch stopped thinking of themselves as part of the Hapsburg empire, and started to think of themselves as Dutch, then as Protestants rather than Catholics. But then there was a backlash because the big, fast changes were uprooting traditions and customs.
Zakaria makes his argument drawing on a vast array of sociological, cultural, economic, and political evidence, rather than doing his own primary research. Based on research by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, he portrays the evolution in societal voting patterns. During the early postwar period, working class people from the US, UK, and Germany voted left of centre, while those in white collar jobs voted to the right.
By the 1960s and 70s, with the advent of a mass middle class society, people increasingly expressed their political identity in terms of ascriptive identities, such as gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, or skin colour, rather than income or economic class. And today the majority of American high-income citizens vote Democrat, with the majority of the white working-class males voting Republican. Zakaria asserts that you can know someone’s voting behaviour based on their views on the “three Gs”—God, guns, and gays. In sum, we’ve moved up Mazlo’s hierarchy of needs to “post-material politics.”
The past 30 years of enormous economic and technological change and transformation has empowered a new meritocratic elite in much of the world. These people are educated, urban, cosmopolitan, and “liberal” with an attachment to individual rights and open markets. But there is a large part of society that deeply resents them and their progressive social values. Indeed, the left is losing the culture wars because it pushed too far and too fast for the rest of society.
According to Zakaria, Brexit, the first Trump presidency, and the popularity of France’s far-right National Rally can be seen as a rebellion against the cultural values of the liberal elite. He quotes former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair who suggested to him that when people feel deep anxiety about their world, they tend not to move left economically, but to move right culturally. In a similar vein, Zakaria argues that America’s chief adversaries—China, Russia, and Iran—are more fearful of America’s liberal ideas than its hard power and are engaged in geocultural balancing. China’s Xi Jinping launched his long running crackdown on freedom because he feared that the Communist Party was being undermined by the liberal policies of earlier leaders. Russia’s Vladimir Putin talks a nationalist and traditionalist narrative, emphasising Moscow’s role as the third Rome. As Iranian mullahs cling onto power, they live in fear of infiltration of Western liberal ideas.
Zakaria concludes with an intriguing chapter, entitled “The Infinite Abyss.” His point is that the freedom of liberalism does not fill the hole in our hearts left by the decline of religion, tradition, and community. According to liberalism, your pursuit of happiness is your own choice. But this can leave many feeling uneasy, anxious, lonely, and hunger for the time when they were told what to believe. Indeed, this may explain the resurgence of nationalism in many parts of the world. The key challenge is how we navigate the backlash. But Zacharia does not really have any serious proposals for addressing this quandary, other than to suggest installing a form of national service which could help improve empathy across class barriers.
Zakaria’s book was written and published before Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection as US president. More recently, Zakaria has offered thoughts on Trump’s foreign policy, without suggesting that there is any such thing as a “Trump doctrine.” Trump has long been a harsh critic of the US-led world order which he believes imposes unfair constraints on the US. For example, in the 1980s he took out a large newspaper advertisement arguing that Japan was ripping off the US on trade, while Europe’s NATO members were freeriding on defence expenditure. These views have since remained at the heart of Trump’s world view. Like all presidents, Trump has much greater freedom on foreign than domestic policy, facilitating his current flurry of foreign policy initiatives. Hence, we may now be seeing an unravelling of the world order.
Analysts like Robert Kagan write that, in reality, the US-led world order ushered in a unique period in world history. It brought an end to conflict in Western Europe, which had known war for centuries. Germany and Japan were transformed from fascist regimes into peaceful democracies. The order helped bring the Cold War to an end, enabling most of the former communist countries of central and eastern Europe to adopt democratic capitalism and join Western institutions. Most countries living under the shackles of colonialism became independent. The world achieved rates of economic growth and poverty reduction never before known in world history. And yet, the US seems to have lost faith in itself and in the world it created.
Zacharia’s book is very much one of speculative analysis where one could quibble with many details. But as we seem to be moving into a new period of world history, with many aspects of the US-led world order seemingly being jettisoned, this book provides many ideas and insights into the “Revolution” we may be living through.
This is a review of Fareed Zakaria’s Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024). ISBN: 978-1-324-10582-4.
John West is the author of the book, Asian Century … on a Knife-Edge, which was reviewed in the Australian Outlook, and executive director of the Asian Century Institute. He has had a long career in international economics and relations, with major stints at the Australian Treasury, OECD, Asian Development Bank Institute, and Tokyo’s Sophia University.
This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
