This is somewhat of a naive view -- the risks of any kind of dictatorship far outweigh any slight chance of good.
Democratic checks-and-balances assume the inescapability of despotic buffoons who rise to power either through force or sometimes even through the people's choice (while it's good to believe in the wisdom of crowds, one must always account for its lapses). I think these are very realistic assumptions.
Democracy seems to work well for some types of problems but not others. What happens to democracies when faced with threats that manifest over very short timescales? They aren't nimble enough to respond in time. This is most evident in larger democracies; look at US/India responses to COVID. Countries like Taiwan are democratic and still succeeded, but they are small and they utilized methods that would be characterized as authoritarian here in the US.
What about problems where the consequences of decisions have a large time-lag? There is no incentive for democratic policymakers to address them. Global warming is the obvious example.
I question whether democracies can handle these kinds of issues. More worryingly, I think that as humanity's capabilities continue to increase, these kinds of problems are going to be more and more frequent.
And the people of the US will have an opportunity to vote in a few months on whether the response was adequate or not. I don't see the people of China having a similar opportunity for example.
To clarify after some further thought - I think the bureaucratic burden scales much more drastically in a democratic system. In a large democracy all decisionmaking becomes mired in a swamp. Of course all governments will require more and more delegation and bureaucracy as the population grows, but IMO to a lesser degree in an authoritarian system, because there is no need to come to a broad consensus before making choices.
Additionally, complexity also scales. A dictatorship relies more on the common sense of the dictator while a democracy relies on a set of written laws that grows with complexity over time. A single party does not need a contract while at least two parties must engage in a contract called a written body of law in order to come to an agreement. This "contract" is edited and amended over time with no limit to how complex it gets.
In fact, that complexity balloons to a point where only experts can understand the law (lawyers). It also grows to the point where the law is so complex that it can become internally inconsistent and develop loop holes that do not serve the original intended purpose of the law.
This allows for entities to exploit these loop holes. Of course only entities with enough money to afford the "experts" to find the loop holes and exploit them will be able bend the laws to their advantage thereby causing only the rich and elite to become more powerful.
The above is the basic theory about the anthropological progression of your typical democracy. Growth in complexity of a body of law to the point where only the elite can afford to hire specialists to take advantage of said law.
That is the main danger of democracy. Excess Complexity to the point where only people who can afford specialists to change the law can exploit it to their advantage. Complexity of law also leads to all kinds of other phenomena that niche experts and common people can take advantage of as well. For example constructors that take advantage of property law.
The scary thing about the theory above is that there is a TON evidence of this. Almost every modern democracy in the world suffers from ALL of the problems above. Literally find me one that doesn't.
Just because she is a white, pregnant woman does not mean that she has the right to break the law and compromise the safety of the community.
Whether you agree or disagree with her arrest and release like two hours after this sort of stuff happens all the time with police but it's a big deal if it's a white lady.
Just for the record im not sure I agree with her arrest but you know... Bigger things to worry about
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome
None of this fits the white lady in distress definition. It just seems like a way to smuggle in anti-white racism for no particular reason. Nothing about this situation has to do with race in any way whatsoever.
There was not 'zero' coverage of the guy's arrest, to the contrary there was wide coverage as a Google search easily reveals. There's also two factors you're not considering, (1) the guy ran a conspiracy theory group which reduces sympathy for him, (2) the woman's arrest came first so it was more novel and thus more engaging from a clicks perspective.
It's absurd that race is being brought into this as a relevant explanatory dimension. Pernicious and divisive to say the least, leaving aside the fact that there's no evidence that race is in any way relevant to either what occurred in this case or the coverage of the case
With sufficiently bad choices in a democracy it ceases to be a democracy before the error is corrected. Also, even when that doesn't happen, its possible for a choice to be bad but repeated in a democracy.
I’d like to see a real world example of what you mean. Because while lots of countries have elections, when leaders are allowed to arbitrarily extend their reign past with their laws allow, then I would agree with you. But those are the countries that I consider falling under the category of “masquerading as a democracy“.
The German Enabling Act of 1933.
> when leaders are allowed to arbitrarily extend their reign past with their laws allow
What if they just use the provisions in the fundamental law that allow changing the structure or terms of government?
A state can either have a thanatocracy in which the dead dictate the details of government to the living, or it can have process by which even the fundamental law can be changed. If it has the latter, that process can, within the preexisting democratic system, be used to terminate democracy without anyone exceeding the power allowed in law.
But just looking at number of times a democratically elected senate has been dissolved throughout history (Rome, Japan (rise of imperial japan), Germany (third reich), Iran (iranian revolution), etc), there has indeed been a lot of "masquerading as a democracy" going on.
Separation of powers makes it harder to raise a dictator but in some cases it's just another piece of legislation away. Hence, I think Americans ought not to take our democracy for granted.
A study by political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern University) released in April 2014 suggested that when the preferences of a majority of citizens conflicts with elites, elites tend to prevail. While not characterizing the United States as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" outright, Gilens and Page do give weight to the idea of a "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters, saying, "Winters has posited a comparative theory of 'Oligarchy,' in which the wealthiest citizens – even in a 'civil oligarchy' like the United States – dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth- and income-protection."
In their study, Gilens and Page reached these conclusions:
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it. ... The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
— Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, 2014
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote:
The stark reality is that we have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people. This threatens to make us a democracy in name only.
— Paul Krugman, 2012