Classical liberalism has made the world a better place.

Zakaria understands that the modern world is no paradise. As he acknowledges early in Chapter 4, the coal mines that literally fueled the Industrial Revolution were dirty, dangerous places to work, and today the engines of commerce create much drudgery and environmental degradation. Still, as Zakaria insists later in Chapter 4, the Industrial Revolution greatly raised working people’s standards of living. It was classical liberalism that made this revolution possible, by creating the right conditions. These include a culture of respect for innovative thought, government policies that rewarded commercial ambition by allowing domestic markets to operate freely, and by building a trade-based international order. It is thanks to classical liberalism, ultimately, that ordinary people have leisure time and are able to enjoy imported consumer goods. Even just in material terms—that is, without weighing the value of things like religious tolerance and the right to elect one’s leaders—the world that classical liberalism has brought into being is tangibly, measurably better than the world that came before it.

The Left-versus-Right debate is giving way to a debate about open-versus-closed.

The Acknowledgments mention that the book’s original title was Beyond Left and Right. In Chapter 1, Zakaria quotes former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, as saying that the lines marking the traditional conflict between Left and Right were fading, and that the emerging great divide of the 21st century was “open versus closed.” This divide separates those who “celebrate markets, trade, immigration, diversity, and open freewheeling technology” from those who view all the same things with suspicion and resist them. However, what Zakaria describes playing out over the decades and centuries is more like a dynamic in which the embrace of classically liberal values alternates between Left and Right. In the early days of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, as Chapter 4 details, it was the Whig Left that advocated for free markets and opposed the welfare state, but after the repeal of the Corn Law, that role was taken up by the Tory Right. In the United States, a somewhat similar dynamic played out against the backdrop of post-Civil War national industrialization and westward expansion. Government involvement in economic markets was first welcomed by powerful industrialists, but later resisted by them and welcomed by rural, agrarian interests.

In the latter half of the 20th century, it was the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan that championed free markets and argued that in their wake would come political freedoms. But when the Democrats under Bill Clinton pivoted toward that vision and Tony Blair did the same in the United Kingdom (see Chapter 8), Newt Gingrich led the American Republicans to turn away from it. It may be that the Left hasn’t embraced classical liberalism as fully as Zakaria would like (has not, that is, stuck to the course Clinton charted), but Zakaria is mainly concerned that today’s Trumpist Right is worrisomely illiberal.

Revolution naturally leads to backlash.

Zakaria engages in some wordplay in Chapter 1, noting that a revolution can mean either an abrupt transition to something new or a cyclical return to a prior state. To him, these opposing meanings of the word “revolution” suggest that every revolution in the first sense naturally meets with resistance and an effort to restore the prior status quo, i.e., a backlash—a revolution in the second sense. This thought supplies the subtitle of the book. The theme is not carried through the book with perfect consistency; for example, Zakaria does not describe any backlash following the Glorious Revolution. However, for most revolutions in the book there is some sort of opposing reaction. The French Revolution, notably, was followed by a whole series of action-reaction episodes: the Reign of Terror, the rise and fall of Napoleon, German Romanticism, and so on.

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