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by pessimizer 1626 days ago
If the premise is that being elected dictator in a free and fair election is undemocratic, it's an authoritarian premise. It presumes that elections are only democratic to the extent that the results agree with some "democratic values" that are separate from the process of having elections.

I agree that the outcomes of democracy can be bad. But I don't believe that bad and undemocratic are synonymous.

1 comments

I don't think that the election is undemocratic, no. I think that when the new dictator bans all opposition parties, dissolves the parliament, replaces judges with his allies, and starts having the police shut down newspapers and torture dissidents, that's undemocratic, even if the dictator was democratically elected in the first place, and even if what the dictator is doing is not bad.