You’re an idealist. Your hopes for democracy are too high, I think. There will always be lying and grifting and cheating politicians. No system of government has ever done away with that, nor could it.
Nor has any system of government successfully engineered away racial, economic, ethnic, tribal, or religious tensions — as you alluded to earlier.
Rather than seeking a system that “solves” all these conflicts (because it’s not out there), why don’t we ask instead: What system is best for *managing* these conflicts?
It’s apparent, at least to me, that regularly seeking the consent of the governed is preferable to letting whoever is currently in charge, for whatever reason — a hereditary claim, or a claim of divinity, or simply having amassed the most firepower — be in charge in perpetuity.
Autocracies are more prone to revolutions, civil wars, and wars of aggression because they can’t manage conflicts as well. The ruling circle’s perspective is always limited. If all power flows through the decree of one man (as in an absolute monarchy, or in an extreme dictatorship like Nazi Germany or Maoist China or contemporary North Korea), then the state is even more prone to making fatal errors.
Democracy provides a way for power to flow toward the party that the citizenry believes has the best ideas. Of course, the citizenry can get it wrong. I would certainly say that errors were made when America elected George W. Bush (architect of the Afghan/Iraq Wars), or Donald Trump (architect of an haphazard attempt to end our constitutional republic as we know it, which culminated on Jan. 6, 2021).
You could say the same about all the conservatives who hate Joe Biden with a passion for their own various reasons.
The point is this: Presidential terms are fixed. Americans who oppose the President can be confident they’ll get another say in a mere 2-4 years. And if a President is re-elected, he can’t serve more than 2 terms. That helps keep political tensions from reaching a breaking point.
Modern-day Russia’s politics are entirely, or almost entirely, run by Vladimir Putin. If you love him, great. If you don’t, then you have no idea when he’s leaving the stage, or what might come after him. So a lot of Russians this year (hundreds of thousands, in fact) made the ultimate vote, and voted with their feet to leave the country.
Democracies are more stable because they come in-built with a capacity for peaceful change. Autocracies? It’s a crapshoot.
