@asayeed @Alon @BenRossTransit @shadihamid i think the US is likely to go for a Taiwan/Korea solution—support illiberal autocracy until it mb someday becomes secure enough to relax into liberalism. that may not succeed, but if you think ugly illiberalism is an unfortunate historical necessity, is it necessarily worse? is it a bad idea to try, given the risks to global (including obviously US/Western) stability of more freeform Islamicized illiberalism?

@asayeed @Alon @BenRossTransit @shadihamid (obviously it could turn out that the longer an inevitable is delayed, the worse a rebound will be, as you say. kind of an austrian business cycle theory of liberal recessions. but, as in austrian economics, what is inevitable is contestable, and succumbing to perhaps avoidable awfulness on the say-so of tenuously evidenced theory carries its own risks.)