This assessment depends greatly on the global rise of the middle class. “No bourgeois, no democracy,” the Harvard theorist Barrington Moore Jr. famously wrote. Fukuyama cites figures showing the worldwide middle class expanding from 1.8 billion people in 2009 to a projected 4.9 billion in 2030. As their incomes rise, he argues, they demand rule of law to protect their property and then demand political participation to safeguard their social standing. They do so not just to defend their economic interests but also for moral reasons. Beyond a certain level of status and income, people become insulted when authoritarian systems of rule treat them as disobedient children.

Fukuyama has learned caution since “The End of History?,” and some readers will tire of his tendency to hedge his bets about the implications of his own theories. If his analysis is true, however, then Presidents Xi and Putin should beware. Over the long term—and nobody knows how long that might be—authoritarian regimes that allow their citizens capitalist freedoms but deny them democratic rights will explode, in revolution, coups, civil war, or a combination of all three. Democratization, Fukuyama seems to be saying, will eventually turn out to be necessary to Russia’s and China’s very survival as unitary states.

He also takes a relatively optimistic view of political developments in the Arab world, arguing that a middle class is steadily growing there, education levels are rising, and economies are opening up, all of which mean that autocracy or military dictatorship cannot last forever. Islam, he insists, is not an enemy of democracy. Indeed, Islamic parties have best captured the demand for political voice and dignity. Fukuyama clings to the Tunisian example, where moderate Islamic parties and secular political groups have agreed on a compromise constitution that does not let Sharia trump the rule of law.

Fukuyama’s assumption that middle classes always want democracy would seem to break down in Egypt, where the middle class of Cairo teamed up with the army to restore a military dictatorship after the first wave of the Arab Spring. Elsewhere, Islamists have exploited demands for voice and dignity, and Syria and Iraq are crumbling as their regimes fight to hold on to power. Not even Fukuyama is up to the challenge of predicting how long this battle will last, or who will win.

In Latin America, democracy has sunk solid roots in Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, and Peru, but in Africa, he concedes, its future is less certain. While stable democratic alternation of political parties is well anchored in some African states, such as Ghana, other countries—such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Central African Republic—face enormous hurdles. They have been so devastated by colonial rapacity and so hobbled by climate, geography, and warring ethnicities that the best they can hope for is to achieve order in any form.