Chang Che’s recent essay in The New Yorker magazine was a quite a fascinating read. The article was based on Che’s conversations with a Shanghai-based Chinese professor of history, Xiao Gongqin, who said he had predicted Trump’s win in this year’s presidential election. The basis of that forecast was Xiao’s observation that the “woke left” in America had overreached, and that a Trump victory was necessary to provide the firm leadership required to counterbalance those liberal excesses.

Professor Xiao is said to have originated the concept of strongman politics called “neo-authoritarianism.” According to Che, Xiao’s work in the early 1980s studying China’s first major attempt at democracy led to the birth of his theory. While some of Xiao’s liberal colleagues were inspired by the liberalization efforts, what he saw was “complete and utter chaos.” “The National Assembly couldn’t do anything except mess things up,” he told Che, adding that “The parties would just go at each other with total disregard for the nation’s interests.” Those observations led Xiao to conclude that his country lacked the ‘“software system” for democracy: a civil society, a rule of law, a culture of political bargaining and compromise.’

Fortunately for Americans, our Founding Fathers built a robust software system for our democracy. But, the culture of political bargaining and compromise, which Xiao thought was a key missing ingredient in China, has become a rarity in Washington in recent years as well. Large numbers of Americans today feel as frustrated with Congress as Xiao did with the chaos in the Chinese National Assembly back then. According to Che, Xiao told him that ‘In order to have democracy, there must be civil society. A civil society requires economic prosperity; economic prosperity requires political stability; and political stability “requires a strongman.”’

Xiao’s contention that strongman rule is a prerequisite for political stability is something that I found quite intriguing. America attracts massive amounts of capital and talent from all over the world mainly because of its rare combination of rule of law and stable politics. But there is no historical evidence that this country has ever been ruled by a strongman. That calls Xiao’s argument into question.

Xiao himself is said to be having second thoughts about his theory lately. As Che puts it, Xiao had envisioned a case of enlightened rule for a period by a dictator in China who would set in motion the type of economic transformation that brings about social stability, to be followed by a graceful exit of the leader. But, according to Che, the iron grip that China’s President Xi Jinping has on Chinese society today has given Xiao pause. With Xi Jinping’s scrapping of presidential term limits, his crackdown on civil society and restrictions on freedom of expression, there no longer seems to be, in Xiao’s view, much hope in the prospects for democracy in China anytime soon. That, says Che, has led Xiao to conclude that “authoritarianism has its own problems.”

Che writes that by its open nature, a democracy is always at risk of welcoming dangerous ideas into its culture and hastening its demise. He says that it was this fear that led Xiao to embrace authoritarianism. Xiao’s hope was that a strongman in China would be more effective at weeding out those bad ideas and saving the country from the dangers they pose. According to Che, in his recent conversation with Xiao following Trump’s victory, Xiao admitted that for his theory to hold water, “a neo-authoritarian leader must be wise, and [yet] he may not be.” In the words of Che, “Once you pin your hopes on a justice-delivering strongman, he may take the righteous path, or he may not. The only certainty is that he has control.”

That last sentence is a downright scary thought. My longstanding worry about authoritarianism is that you never know what you are going to get with a human being. If the hoped-for enlightened ruler turns out to be a monster, the last thing anyone in that society wants is for the vile tyrant to have total control over the population.

For every Lee Kuan Yew, there are a thousand Bashar al-Assads. The odds are always extremely long that a society that experiments with authoritarianism will get the former type of leader, and not the latter. The multitude of tyrannies around the world today shows how perilous it is for any nation to make this leap of faith. Personally, I much prefer to live in a country where political power is widely dispersed.

As Americans, we must count ourselves extremely lucky that at that critical juncture in our nation’s history, we had a group of wise men, not a single despot, who designed the Constitution that gave us our robust institutions. Admittedly, some of those men were flawed human beings, but what they all possessed, in addition to their wisdom, was that rare ability to bargain and compromise. Because of their creation, America today is largely a self-correcting society. Through regular elections, the citizens are able to express their preferences and remedy whatever it is they see going wrong in the country. Periodically, the pendulum does swing too far in one direction, but there is some invisible that always pulls the nation back to the middle. In Xiao’s view, a neo-authoritarian in the form of Trump was needed to deal with out-of-control political correctness in America. In reality, no such autocrat is required in this country. The people are more than capable of resolving the issue themselves.

Because of the messiness of democratic governance, it can be quite tempting to subscribe to this neo-authoritarianism theory. As I thought more about Xiao’s concept after reading the essay, it dawned on me that his desired strongman actually doesn’t have to be in the form of a human being. America has managed to enjoy political stability pretty much throughout its history because of its strong institutions. In essence, the Constitution is our strongman.