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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year.

And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one,

because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

Today we're going to be talking about revolutions, because this book is now out,

The Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlast from 1600 to the present by the very distinguished

Farid Zakaria, who I'm delighted to say joins me here in the Spectator's office. Forreed,

thank you very much for coming in. It's a huge pleasure to be here. So progress and backlash from

1600 to the present. The sort of drift of this book, I think, is that liberalism is a

revolutionary thing. There are constant revolutions disruption, which leads to technological change,

which leads to disruption, I should say, which leads to identity crisis, which leads to

disorder, upheaval and so on. And this has been

going on for a long time. And so even though today a lot of people feel we're living in a sort

of revolutionary age, what you're saying essentially is this has been the case for some time.

Exactly. I think you heard exactly right. The way I see it, ever since the beginning of the kind of liberal enlightenment project

and the application of those ideas in states, you know, in the Netherlands, in Britain, in America,

what you've seen as this pattern of technological, economic progress, transformations, which then produce identity transformations.

I mean, you see it right with the Dutch, where as they start to succeed, they start to think

of themselves as differently. We're not part of the Habsburg Empire. We're Dutch. We're not part

of Christian Europe. We're Catholic. I'm sorry, we're Protestant. We're not part of Christian Europe. We're Catholic. I'm sorry, we're Protestant. We're

...