Why the World is Going Backwards — And How to Stop It

If the World Feels Like It’s Regressing, That’s Because It Is

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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 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 or the American Revolution.

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.Though America is finally making progress, the GOP is still captured by Trumpism. Then there’s Britain, which is becoming a failed state by the day. There are the manfluencers peddling hyperpatriarchal views of men and women. There’s the anti-vaxxers, the incels, the far right gaining ground across the globe, from China to India to Italy to even European strongholds of social democracy, like Sweden. There’s the Creepy Billionaire Who Bought Twitter, turning it into a playground of hate. I could go on and on.

But what are these revolutions against, precisely?