This chapter assesses the broader validity of the book's theoretical argument by analyzing the massive reverse wave of the interwar years and four processes of authoritarian hardening across history. In all of these episodes in which liberal democracy fell to autocracy, or in which existing autocratic regimes turned more repressive and "closed," revolutionary challenges prompted these political regressions. The advance of authoritarianism and fascism during the 1920s and 1930s constituted a widespread reactionary backlash to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In a similar vein, the French Revolution of 1789 set in motion a repressive turn in Europe, and the Revolutions of 1848 provoked a wave of counterrevolution. The Iranian Revolution of 1978/79 had a similarly regressive effect across the Middle East, even years after the triggering events. And the color revolutions in the post-Communist world prompted the hardening of autocracy in Putin's Russia and in other Eurasian countries.