Why the World is Going Backwards (and How to Stop It)

The Rise of the Anti-Revolution

All around this troubled globe, we’re seeing the rise of a phenomenon as strange as an ice-storm in a desert: the regressive revolution.

We’re used, you and I in the West, and especially in the US, where our creation myth glorifies one triumphantly, to seeing revolutions as the wheel of human progress only ever turning forwards. But revolutions, more precisely understood, can go either way: the wheel can move backwards, too. Backwards revolutions, luckily, are rarer in the sweep of human history, and if they weren’t, then you and I would probably be stuck in caves, bonded to our plows. Hence, we’ve come to only see revolution as only positive things which enshrine democracy, rights, equality, and so on — like the French Revolution, the American Revolution, etcetera.

But regressive revolutions happen too, which are often later given names like fascism, authoritarianism, and tyranny — though, in the heat of the moment, the emergence of a new order might be glorified as something more grand and promising. Such was the case in Iran, Venezuela, and post-Soviet Russia, to name just a few.

Today, if we look around the world carefully, we see regressive revolutions popping up, like little pre-cancerous sores, nearly everywhere that we look. In Europe, there are Poland and Turkey, and the first stirrings in Germany. There is Brexit in Britain. And in America, of course, there is Trumpism, which grows more tragicomic by the day (a pedophile for Senate?).

But what are these revolutions against, precisely? . . .

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