Oh, the folly of assuming that pursuing an all-or-nothing pro-democracy vision is a winning strategy! You see, building alliances to keep China and Russia in check requires rubbing elbows with some unsavory characters. You better get chummy with monarchs, military honchos, and various shades of not-so-democratic leaders like Narendra Modi of India and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. If you don’t, you might as well hand over the keys to the world to Moscow’s strongmen or Beijing’s techno-dystopia enforcers.

And let’s talk about domestic politics, shall we? You can’t keep the home front united by constantly poking your political adversaries in the eye with your pro-democracy stick. Besides, if your democratic ideals constantly snuggle up with your liberal-leaning cronies, you’re bound to tick off the Republicans. And guess what? That kind of coziness won’t withstand political winds, which tend to shift come election time.

Now, there are those who fantasize that illiberalism’s only hold on the world is through heavy-handed regimes suppressing their people. They like to think that if you could just lift the big old boot of tyranny off the throats of folks in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, they’d come running to join the liberal club! Oh, if only it were that simple.

But let’s take a gander at the reality check provided by the Bennett Institute report. It doesn’t just show that the hoi polloi in non-Western lands are rather partial to China and Russia. It also serves up a sobering cocktail of evidence that what’s driving a wedge between developed democracies and developing countries is a fundamental difference in values. The cherry on top is a chart buried deep in the report, revealing the gap between socially liberal values (think secularism, individualism, and all things progressive) in high-income democracies and the rest of the world over the past three decades. Surprise, surprise! The chart shows that while the fancy democracies are out strutting their liberal stuff, the rest of the globe hasn’t changed much, with no sign of warming up to social liberalism anytime soon.