In history books, bloody revolutions and popular uprisings get all the attention. But if you look at the past more closely, many epochal democratic breakthroughs happened after the storm or next to it, when pressured autocratic regimes made concessions to democracy out of pragmatism and through reform, argues David Brooks of the New York Times.

In 1848 a democratic revolution swept across Europe, and then promptly collapsed. housands of protesters were killed in the streets. Authoritarian regimes were re-established. Some called 1848 ‘the turning point when Europe failed to turn.’

And yet that was not true. Anti-democratic regimes did regain power, but within decades they had enacted most of the reforms the revolutionaries of 1848 had asked for. Constitutions were written. Suffrage was expanded. Welfare systems were created.
 

Conservative authoritarians enacted these reforms reluctantly, and with cynical motivations. But they knew they had to keep up with the times to retain their grip on power and to forestall more radical change. Democracy did not move forward in a burst of glory, but in a long slog of gradual concessions made by reluctant conservative reformers.

I wonder if, when we look back at the world of today from some future vantage point, we will see an echo of that pattern.
 

We will see a burst of democratic change that swept the world between 1980 and 2005. Authoritarian regimes collapsed, sometimes under their own weight (the Soviet Union), sometimes amid outside pressure (the Philippines) and sometimes by force (Iraq). In places where the fabric of society was thick, nations maintained their equilibrium and democratic dreams were realized.
 

But in nations where totalitarianism had been strongest, and civil society most brutally pulverized, liberation begat chaos.
 

In these places, the old political order was the only source of social authority, and once that was removed everything was permissible. The worst people in the nation were given free rein to prey upon the best. In Iraq, that meant brutal violence, rampant crime and a sectarian power struggle that produced unimaginable horror.

In Russia, the chaos produced a culture of plunder and gangsterism that rewarded the dishonest. A large share of the population was set free to drink themselves to death, with the average lifespan of the Russian man declining by seven years.
 

Moreover, the Western liberators were complicit in and discredited by the chaos. In Russia, the West sent in economists and technocrats. Coming from places that had always been stable, they took for granted the moral foundations that undergird stability. They did not see that Russia lacked these foundations, and that any institutions they built on top would simply be perverted.

In Iraq, the American liberators did not understand what would happen if brutalized Iraqis were left in a state of nature, and did not or could not impose a humane order.

So if the first stage of the democratic era in these places was liberation and the second stage was chaos, the third stage was conservative restoration. Unlike the Western democrats, the conservatives - Putin in Russia, the theocrats and strongmen who came to dominate Iraq - did understand the desire for order. They understood the people’s desire to live in an environment in which it was possible to lead a dignified life. They shared the feeling of national shame that had come amid the chaos and the longing to restore national prestige. In short, they had a deeper understanding of human nature than the technocrats who came to modernize them.

The autocrats created nations that were not totalitarian but not free. On the one hand they sought to stifle liberty in order to secure their grip on power. Democracy activists were arrested and TV stations suborned.
 

On the other hand, as in 1848, the democratic forces did not go away. The people, especially the growing middle classes, longed for freedom. New technologies threatened centralized power. The conservative autocrats would find that if they did not buy off the public with gradual reforms, they would either have to rule by terror, which is unstable, or more radical reforms would be imposed upon them.
 

If this pattern is true, and future historians do look back on our period this way, then a crucial task for U.S. foreign policy in the years ahead will be to cajole semi-autocratic regimes - in places ranging from Russia to the Middle East and even China - into making gradual democratic reforms. At the moment, we do this badly, alternating between bold speeches that call for revolution and craven diplomatic gestures that suggest capitulation.
 

We are out of the period of mass rallies and toppling regimes and orange revolutions. We are coming into a period of, at best, a gradualist conservative reform. It is time to come up with a strategy for helping today’s unimaginative autocrats to become new and improved Bismarcks.

This opinion by first appeared in The New York Times.

By David Brooks