1979: The Great Backlash

The events of 1979 tell us a great deal about the nature of counterrevolution, which is very important to understand, because we might be living through another one right now. Perhaps the key insight is that though counterrevolutionaries may be reactionaries, they are not mere conservatives. Conservatives aspire to return to the status quo ante. Counterrevolutionaries understand that their revolutionary opponents have changed the rules of the game in fundamental ways and that the reaction must adjust accordingly. Although philosophers Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre rejected the French Revolution as evidence of "progress" run amok, they responded with intellectual programs of such vigor and sophistication that the leaders they claimed to be defending didn't always find themselves approving.

The shrewdest counterrevolutionaries, moreover, happily exploit revolutionary achievements to their own ends. Deng understood that, by imposing its harsh unity throughout the once fissured mainland, China's dictatorship of the proletariat had actually created the preconditions for a thoroughly bourgeois, ruthlessly capitalist economy. (Wasn't it supposed to work the other way around?) The shah's modernization program displaced legions of overeducated, underemployed young men from villages to the margins of big cities—disoriented, angry, and ripe for recruitment by the "traditionalist" Khomeini. As for Thatcher, one of her most eloquent opponents within her own party was writer Ian Gilmour, who reproached her for failing to grasp that "real" conservatism meant above all adherence to the received order: "British Conservatism is not an '-ism.' It is ... not a system of ideas. It is not an ideology or a doctrine." Thatcher, by contrast, embodied a classic counterrevolutionary paradox: She wanted change, radical change, in order to get back to the way things should be.

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