Interesting points. I have a few responses. I think you might be slightly underrating the internal stability of democratic institutions. Nascent democracies li

Interesting points. I have a few responses. I think you might be slightly underrating the internal stability of democratic institutions. Nascent democracies like the Weimar Republic are vulnerable to the "vote to become authoritarian" failure mode (though even the Weimar Republic "voted to become authoritarian" via the dubious mechanism of a minority government and a political culture where every major party engaged in street violence), but a well-established democracy has a fair amount of internal stability. France, for instance, has successfully reestablished democracy even after foreign conquest and the military coup of 1958. The US and UK have been even more stable. > Thus, by installing an authoritarian government in a place that used to be democratic, we condemned them to likely stay authoritarian until EXTERNAL factors are able to force things otherwise. And that is outside of the population's control and could go on for a very long time. Especially if the ruling elite have some accomodation with the global system that allows them to avoid the competition you speak of, like an unspoken deal to keep fossil fuels flowing in exchange for being left alone. I assume you're talking about Iran again here. Iran's democracy was already in the midst of an internal collapse towards authoritarianism even before the coup, though. Mossadegh suspended Parliament and invoked emergency powers in the face of internal opposition. Even the coup itself arguably had more internal than external causes (see: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2014-06-16/what-really-happened-iran https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2014-06-... as archived at https://archive.ph/wdEy8 https://archive.ph/wdEy8). But if you look at things more broadly, there are examples of authoritarian regimes giving way to democracies for largely internal causes, in countries such as Chile, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, and South Korea. So there's some evidence for democracy also being a stable attractor, though this is far from universal if you look at countries like Russia, Afghanistan, or most of the Arab world.