Max J. Prowant
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.
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