But many of these examples do not quite hold up, and as the book progresses, one gets the impression that Zakaria is overreaching. A key example is the contrast he offers between Russia’s efforts to democratize without introducing liberal economic and social policies, and China’s efforts to liberalize without democratizing.“To oversimplify,” says Zakaria, “China is reforming its economics before its politics, whereas Russia did the reverse.” The picture he drawsׁof Russia’s disorder and poverty in the midst of democratization, and China’s prosperity in the face of continuing Communist ruleׁmight have been compelling five years ago. Today’s China, however, is hardly prospering, nor is Russia exactly floundering. Yet Zakaria makes no effort to explain why this is, and instead ends up offering a questionable defense of China’s despots: We should be glad there is no democracy in China, because the masses are more hard-line and anti-American than their rulers. “On a wide range of issues, from law and order to attitudes regarding Taiwan, Japan, and the United States,” Zakaria writes,“the Beijing regime is less populist, nationalist, aggressive, and intolerant than its people.” Of course, he concedes, it is difficult to measure public opinion in China, since“one ends up relying on the few surveys that the government allows, the bursts of public opinion in Internet chat rooms, good reporting by foreign newspapers, and other such indications. But surely,” he concludes, “it is indicative that all these sources point in the same direction.”

But is it? The Chinese people, in fact, subsist on a diet of government-fed propaganda that undoubtedly gives shape to their belligerent views. But more importantly, this sort of reasoning betrays a desire to make autocracy look responsible and democracy bad. Indeed, a certain soft spot for despots colors much of the book, as when Zakaria lavishly praises Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf for pursuing a path of“radical political, social, educational, and economic reform that even his supporters would not have predicted,” and informs readers that he has been able to do these things “precisely because he did not have to run for office.” The trouble is, as Robert Kagan pointed out in his review of Zakaria’s book for The New Republic, Musharraf’s reforms are not liberal. The U.S. State Department describes Musharraf’s human rights record as “poor,” and Freedom House locates Pakistan in the “Not Free” category, designated for states that are neither democratic nor liberal.

Zakaria’s other examples fare little better. The notion that the tragedy of Venezuela under Chavez is the fault of democracy is questionable. It is, more likely, an example of the failure of precisely the sort of elite rule that Zakaria prescribes for the developing worldׁas Chavez has placed more and more of the nation’s economy under the control of central planning bureaucracies. Moreover, the idea that Chilean President Augusto Pinochet“did eventually lead his country to liberal democracy׃” ignores many salient facts of his reign, such as his responsibility for the death or disappearance of thousands of civilians in the years following his seizure of power in a coup, and conveniently fails to take account of Chile’s democratic tradition before Pinochet’s imposition of (an unquestionably more prosperous) order. And the claim that Indonesia under Suharto was a model of “order, secularism, and economic liberalization” would certainly be news to many Indonesians, the vast majority of whom suffered in the late 1990s from Suharto’s exploitation of the Indonesian economy for the enrichment of himself and his small group of courtiers.

With regard to the Arab world, Zakaria argues that pushing for democracy would yield only negative results: Because Arab political culture has no democratic tradition, it is extremely unlikely that the choices made by the populace would point in liberal directions. Far better, then, to accept the status quo: “The Arab rulers of the Middle East are autocratic, corrupt, and heavy-handed,”writes Zakaria, “but they are still more liberal, tolerant, and pluralistic than what would likely replace them. Elections in many Arab countries would produce politicians who espouse views that are closer to Osama bin Laden’s than those of Jordan’s liberal monarch, King Abdullah.”

This argument—that a benevolent strongman is far better than a populist election—is of course not new, and has been employed around the world by those seeking to impede the introduction of democratic reforms. As anyone who follows the Israeli-Palestinian conflict knows, this same argument—that if free elections were held in the Palestinian Authority, the winner would be Hamas—has helped keep Yasser Arafat, the purported“lesser of two evils,” in power. While in any given case the argument might potentially have some appeal, such claims too often end up lending support to the most repressive of regimes.

Zakaria’s fundamental idea—that the trouble with the world is too much democracy—is impressive both for its boldness and for its potential to illuminate important yet often overlooked difficulties involved in spreading democracy. Yet his arguments do not actually substantiate his claim. This is most clearly the case in his extensive discussion of the problems of democracy in the United States, for which he reserves his most vehement criticism.

Zakaria takes up the state of American democracy in the book’s final chapters, where he makes clear that his fundamental argument is not so much that democracy should wait for liberalism, but that democracy can at times work against the foundations of liberal society. In other words, even in America there is such a thing as too much democracy. In his view, this is precisely the situation that has characterized the United States in the last century. “The political history of the twentieth century is the story of ever-greater and more direct political participation,” he explains.“And success kept expanding democracy’s scope. Whatever the ailment, more democracy became the cure.” Yet this trend “has produced an unwieldy system, unable to govern or command the respect of people. Although none would dare speak ill of present-day democracy, most people instinctively sense a problem.”

To Zakaria, the trouble lies with what he calls the “democratization” of American democracy, a process that has systematically eroded the public’s respect for the very institutions on which democracy is founded. Zakaria writes:

Zakaria attributes a long list of popular complaints about the American political system to the phenomenon of increased democratization: The work of Congress, for example, has been made more transparent, and is therefore more open to pressure from lobbyists and increasingly hampered by public posturing and petty factionalism. Political parties now use primary elections rather than small steering committees or caucuses to select candidates, which means that more irresponsible populists and fewer level-headed men of good conscience are elected to office. At every level, Zakaria argues, American politics has become more open to direct popular involvement, and less prone to follow the guidance of experienced leaders and wise old hands. On the whole, the change has not been for the better, and “almost everyone associated with these reforms—politicians, journalists, activists, scholar—believes they have made matters worse.”

This democratization has reached beyond politics, as well. Banks and stock markets have sought to attract middle- and lower-class customers, putting the American economy at the whim of countless small investors rather than in the hands of professionals, whom Zakaria sees as the imperial arbiters who alone are able to promote the general interests of society. Even American religion, he worries, no longer defers to the authority of the genteel Protestant clergy. Rather, it has been replaced by an unruly, evangelical Christianity, watered down for mass consumption. “All it really takes to be a fundamentalist these days,” Zakaria concludes dismissively, “is to watch the TV shows, go to the theme parks, buy Christian rock, and vote Republican.”