The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.
Aside from the occasional genocide, oppression, evil and torture, etc., it is inarguable that public policy could be implemented more rapidly in an autocracy.
In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
The Chinese, as befits a Communist autocracy, approached the task of dominating the Olympics with top-down military discipline.
Autocracy is a government of the few from above; Bolshevism is a government of the few from below.
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.