Why Some Revolutions Work and Others Don't
Progress has always been met with backlash, but some revolutions have succeeded and others have failed. Fareed Zakaria explains why.
The American Revolution seemed like a movement that could be easily replicated elsewhere. Englishmen had escaped their king’s authority and created a government by and for ordinary people. It seemed like the dawn of a new democratic era.
Except, it wasn’t.
The French Revolution ended in bloodshed that largely targeted ordinary French citizens rather than royals. In his book Age of Revolutions, Fareed Zakaria noted that “most of the guillotine’s seventeen thousand or so victims came from the working class — for instance, everyday grocers caught violating laws against hoarding food.” Instead of a bottom-up revolution driven by ordinary people, the Reign of Terror “was a top-down program of state violence against ordinary people.”
The French Revolution paved the way for Napolean to conquer France and then much of Europe, where democratic revolutions were also snuffed out.
Zakaria explains why some revolutions create lasting change while others end in fresh waves of terror. Those lessons also point the way forward through our own period of monumental change and instability.
Looking Ahead vs. Looking Back
When times are tough, it’s easy to look back at the past when life seemed easier. The reality is rarely that simple — especially in history.
Populist leaders often use the past as a guidepost for their campaigns. They promise to return the country to a golden era when life was better and times were plentiful. It’s a tempting promise, but it usually whitewashes hardships that everyone had to suffer in the “before times.”
A better approach comes from Edmund Burke, a British statesman and the original conservative. Zakaria describes Burke and his worldview this way:
“A ferocious critic of the abuse of power by the East India Company and a British defender of American colonists’ rights, he believed in liberty and even in radical change at times, but only if it could be brought about organically, without upending society.”
Burke recognized the need to change along with a changing world. The end of his life saw the American and French Revolutions, the early sputterings of a world that would transform during the half of the Industrial Revolution that was just around the corner.
However, Burke recognized that the American Revolution succeeded because it was driven by the colonists themselves. American farmers weren’t being held at gunpoint and told to accept the Constitution. They fought for it and crafted it themselves.
The American Constitution also retained some of the best features of England’s system of government. The upper and lower chambers of Congress mirror the upper and lower chambers of Parliament. The king was removed and the president’s power diluted, but there was still a head of state and a position to execute the laws set by Congress. America’s transformation kept useful pieces of government that were familiar to the colonists. Zakaria notes:
“For Burke, without reform there is stagnation. But radical change without conservation of key elements of the past risks the disintegration of society.”
The Temptation to Remain in Place
After the French Revolution devolved into the Reign of Terror, there was a backlash not only against democratic movements but also against the Enlightenment. Some on the political right blamed the Enlightenment’s “cold rationalism” for the failures of the French Revolution. Those failures birthed a new movement that flourished in the German states: Romanticism, which Zakaria described this way:
“In its most benign form, this meant angst-filled poetry and art that emphasized the heart over the head, like Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther…In the political realm, however, Romanticism lit the spark of a simmering, vengeful German nationalism that would eventually morph into fascism.”
Emphasizing the unique importance of the individual made for great writing about ordinary people affected by the excesses of the Industrial Revolution. Zakaria also quotes several writers who saw the Industrial Revolution as a dark period associated with great evil:
“An 1804 poem by William Blake lamented how ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ had been marred by ‘those dark Satanic mills.’” However, Zakaria reintroduces historical perspectives to Romantic associations with industry and evil. “Rural farming, near the level of subsistence — that is to say, the constant threat of starvation — was the norm for almost all of history up until the twentieth century.”
It’s easy to lose historical perspective and say the times we’re living in now are the hardest and saddest of them. Those skewed perspectives make it easy to fall for arguments that we should do what we’ve always done. Let the world change, we’ll remain the same, and we’ll be just as prosperous as yesterday.
Only, that doesn’t work. Zakaria’s book is filled with examples of great powers that fail to adapt to new worlds. Spain was the world’s great naval power until Great Britain overcame it. The Dutch also became more commercially successful than their “erstwhile masters” after they broke from Spanish rule. Europe was the center of commerce and power until the United States emerged as a superpower after its World War II victory. One of the first lessons of Zakaria’s book is:
“Those who enter a new era with size and strength often do not master it. Those who adapt best to that new age thrive.”
Navigating Today’s Changing World
Ordinary people may not be the ones running states and making grand political decisions. However, their choices about who to follow in an unsteady world are crucial to how well their country will adapt.
The Information Revolution gave everyone their own printing press. Information has never been made more available, but our capacity to filter that information hasn’t kept up with the rapid change in technology. Further, new AI technologies threaten white-collar jobs as well as blue-collar ones. For all its promise, AI is a destabilizing technology that makes ordinary people rightfully anxious.
Whatever adaptations political leaders want to make must receive the buy-in of ordinary people to make changes permanent. History also teaches us that avoiding change altogether is an attractive political message, but in the long run, it’s a destructive impulse that will leave countries that refuse to adapt behind.
Populists promise a return to a golden age, but returning to the past is impossible and undesirable. The best way forward is to pull the best parts of society into the new world with us, rather than fall for false promises of reprieve from the world’s change. This approach is uncomfortable, but it’s much better than falling behind the world cocooned in a comfortable fantasy.