>Well you could argue the Soviet system was bound to fail due to the inherent hypocrisies it had. It fell, but not for very long: they briefly tried out a demo

>Well you could argue the Soviet system was bound to fail due to the inherent hypocrisies it had. It fell, but not for very long: they briefly tried out a democracy, but then Putin took over and ever since then, it's been effectively a dictatorship with elections similar to the "elections" in North Korea, and now the dictator and the people alike all wanting to re-establish the old Soviet Union, including taking former Soviet-controlled territories/nations by force. So I don't think this is a very good example. As for China, that's just conjecture; almost all the western nations have similar problems with their birthrates. Many have tried to turn to massive immigration, and that's just led to a huge rise in far-right-wing parties and likely coming authoritarianism. I honestly can't think of many times when an authoritarian system was toppled from within, without the US or similar doing it by force. Perhaps Spain, but they only turned democratic because their dictator died of old age. Maybe Greece? The UK did it, but it took literally centuries, in a very slow process of moving power from the crown to the democratic parliament until the king/queen was nothing more than a figurehead.