The fact that we retreat to moral arguments — and often moral arguments only — to justify democracy, Robert Kaplans says, indicates that for many parts of the world the historical and social arguments supporting democracy are just not there:
Realism has come not from us but from, for example, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, an enlightened Hobbesian despot whose country has posted impressive annual economic growth rates — 10 percent recently — despite tribal struggles in the country’s north. In 1986 Museveni’s army captured the Ugandan capital of Kampala without looting a single shop; Museveni postponed elections and saw that they took place in a manner that ensured his victory.“I happen to be one of those people who do not believe in multi-party democracy,” Museveni has written. “In fact, I am totally opposed to it as far as Africa today is concerned…. If one forms a multi-party system in Uganda, a party cannot win elections unless it finds a way of dividing the ninety-four percent of the electorate [that consists of peasants], and this is where the main problem comes up: tribalism, religion, or regionalism becomes the basis for intense partisanship.” In other words, in a society that has not reached the level of development Toqueville described, a multi-party system merely hardens and institutionalizes established ethnic and regional divisions.
From Was Democracy Just a Moment? (1997).