[mikeash]

I think most of us accept that democracy is imperfect. There’s a reason for the popularity of the quote that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

The main, perhaps only, advantage of democracy is that it is resilient. A dictatorship can easily decide to plant a ton of trees and shut down dirty factories. It can just as easily decide to dump toxic waste into the rivers and shoot anyone who complains. A benevolent dictatorship is much better than democracy, this is pretty widely accepted. It’s better until the dictator dies or is overthrown, then you don’t know what you’ll get.

To quote Scott Alexander, “If you remember nothing else about the superiority of democracies to other forms of government, remember the fact that in three years, we will have a change of leadership and almost no one is stocking up on canned goods to prepare for the inevitable civil war.”