The rest of the world tend to prefer illiberal democracy, and if you don't like that, you have to live with dictatorship -- which makes space for some personal freedoms at the expense of political freedoms -- that suppresses democracy.
[WS:] Again, no disagreement here. I am just a bit wary about framing it in terms of "preferences." Yes, these are choices based on value judgments, but not of the kind "well, what do we have here? Socialism, liberal democracy, third way, fascism... Ok, I'll take fascism."
People cannot prefer or desire what they do not know, and what they do know is based almost exclusively on their past experience, a big part of which is "stock knowledge" - or interpretative schemata beliefs and institutional forms that a particular society treats as granted and self-evident, and thus beyond any doubt.
So here is the paradox: people do have choices, yet they can choose only what they know, and what they know is determined by the society in which they live, its institutional structures, stock knowledge, and the ways new knowledge is processed and accepted or rejected. So at the end, the most likely outcome of most popular choices is the reproduction of the already existing social structures.
I think that the biggest delusion of modernity - shared by both the laissez fair advocates and the left, especially of the Leninist-Maoist provenance - is that the institutional structure of society can be changed in a "designer" fashion, by fiat or personal determination, getting rid of some organizational forms, and replacing them with more desirable ones. I think that if there were only one lesson from the Soviet and Asian communism experience, it would be that one cannot re-engineer a society and change its habits of the heart, except by force.
So here is the dilemma: one can support the "liberation" of the peoples with whose plight one empathize, but an almost certain outcome of such liberation is the establishment of a similar, or even nastier, social order that oppressed them. Or, knowing that, one can opt for a more "designer" or interventionist approach the US or the Soviet style - saving those peoples from themselves, and imposing a new form of social organization by force, against popular will. In either case, one ends up with an authoritarian rule of one sort or another.
Frankly, I have not been able to resolve this dilemma and I sort of oscillate between these two options. Sometimes I am inclined to "let" other peoples make their own political institutions, and if those institutions fall short what I (or for that matter other Westerns) would like to see, so be it, because I do not have to deal with their consequences. On other occasions, I am more inclined toward smashing "the old order" (or "false consciousness") with an iron fist, and establishing new "designer" order the Soviet way, by force, and then hope that in the next hundred or so years people will internalize this new order to the point of preferring it, if given a choice. This also applies to my attitude toward the Middle East.
Wojtek