A reader asks:

Why do the critics of liberal democracy assume that their views would be adopted by their benevolent authoritarian regime?

For the same reason that believers in reincarnation always imagine they were once kings or knights or great explorers rather than toothless scullery maids or short-lived and dimwitted male prostitutes in Syrian dungeons, I suppose.

More seriously, I think it’s because the whole point of the exercise is to imagine a system organized around the one immutable principle of all such dreamers: “In a more perfect world, everything would revolve around ME!”