What's the alternative? Enlightened dictatorships are even worse. Sure, they work for a while, but at some point family ties override everything and you end up with Dumbo as chief of state when his brilliant parent dies.
Singapore might be a flawed democracy, but it still is one. The ruling party does fear losing vote share in elections and adapts its policies to win public support (e.g. in the 2011 elections when the opposition won 40% of the vote).
Even Singapore's founder/dictator said that Singapore style government wont work in huge country like India with its different religions, languages, cultures etc.
I do know about Singapore. Feel free to point out another 5 examples from the entire history of mankind, all 5000 years of it, all across the world.
Oh, to clarify, I want a longer time frame. I want a autocratic regime which didn't hit the "Dumbo peak" within 1 century, +/- 20 years. Heck, even Singapore doesn't qualify, their system has been up for only about 60 years. They still have about as many years to hit a dud.
This is a silly argument. Every regime has an arch and succumbs to corruption eventually. "Works for a while" describes every regime in history of mankind.
Why would it be silly? The whole point of democracy is to prevent that decay...
Or are you assuming that democracy naturally devolves into a corrupt regime? I doubt it. It seems to be the exact opposite: stable, long term democracies are the most resilient ones.
>Or are you assuming that democracy naturally devolves into a corrupt regime?
All governments regardless of their nature or intent devolve into corrupt regimes over time. The nature of government - authority through a monopoly on violence and coercive taxation - makes corruption, authoritarianism and collapse inevitable.
How many long term democracies are there? If you mean US and not see corruption (which is only getting worse) then you are paying very poor attention. The US is an oligarchy at best and a fascist state (and no I do not mean Trump) at worst.
Democracies are not only direct, they're also representative. Also, no plan survives contact with the enemy, I'm not talking about Utopia here. The US is absolutely a democracy, as one manifests itself in real life. So is the UK, France, the Scandinavian countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc.