“The best laboratory for a rebuke to Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 “End of History” thesis — basically, that the arc of history bends toward democracy — may not be some weakly governed, coup-ridden country in Africa, but Saudi Arabia, where I recently spent several weeks… It isn’t that they are opposed to democracy per se. It is simply that personal freedoms — protecting minorities, freedom to travel or to order any book from abroad, etc. — and efficient governance matter more to them than the ability to vote every few years. This may seem strange to Western elites who take mundane personal freedoms for granted, and thus are consumed with politics — and therefore assume everyone else should be, too.” 

-Robert D. Kaplan’s opinion piece, To Save Democracy, We Need a Few Good Dictators [Bloomberg]