I was democracy-pilled by reading biographies of Franco and Salazar. The Iberian countries in the 1930’s were what every right-wing authoritarian fantasizes about: vigorous young conservative dictators firmly in charge of a country, liberals totally defeated and out of power. Both were able to stay in power for decades.
The result? For a while they owned the libs but eventually their countries just stagnated. Badly. To stay in power, Franco and Salazar had to systematically defang any organization that could in theory threaten their rule. Yes this meant left-wing universities and pro-democracy groups, but it also meant the church, the military, etc. Salazar in particular tried to trip these of power and resources so they could never threaten his rule. A damning incident in the Franco biography was that near the end of Franco’s rule his Prime Minister was assassinated by Basques and Franco couldn’t find a replacement for him. A country of tens of millions of people and nobody qualified to be PM. That’s what decades of suppressing the production of new elites does. To a dictator, any young ambitious person is a potential threat and must not be allowed to blossom too much.
Democracy has many flaws but having rival teams of elites is something you don’t appreciate until you lose it.
That is from Hadur.