For the Islamists who inherited the Arab Spring and their eager supporters, the future was the past, a return to the glories of the Caliph and his harem
The slogan under which Obama hopes to win the next four years is "Forward". "Forward" is the quintessential progressive slogan, progressives being people who are so forward-thinking that they want to remake the 21st Century in line with their 19th Century ideas. Progressivism, like so many other flavors of futurism, is so new it's old. It's the world of tomorrow as imagined by men with top hats and full beards whose Twitter-wielding descendants are still shouting, "March Forward!" at us 150 years later.