The parent comment is an exceedingly narrow description: totalitarians always tighten their hold until they collapse. I wasn't making a correspondingly strong

The parent comment is an exceedingly narrow description: totalitarians always tighten their hold until they collapse. I wasn't making a correspondingly strong counterclaim that the transition was smooth and bloodless for every/most polities. We can quibble about whether Post-Civil War Britain qualifies as having sufficiently transitioned to democracy (and if not, then Post-CW Britain is the polity in question that transitioned without collapse). But it's easy to refute the ludicrous original claim that polities under totalitarians only ever follow a single path.