Without a lawful way to remove a ruler, correcting a mistake takes a crisis

The argument

The second argument concerns what happens when a government goes wrong, which proponents of this position argue every government eventually does. Their claim is that the test of a political arrangement is not how well it performs at its best but how cheaply it recovers at its worst, and that this is where the two arrangements part company decisively. A democracy, on this account, has a routine remedy. A government that has failed is voted out, the loser leaves, and the cost of the correction is an election. Proponents argue that this is an extraordinary thing to have: a standing procedure by which power changes hands without anyone being killed, and one that makes the threat of removal credible enough to discipline a government long before it is used. An autocracy has no equivalent. However enlightened the ruler, there is no lawful mechanism by which the country can decide it has had enough, so the only routes available are death, palace intrigue or revolt. Proponents argue that the consequences run further than the moment of transition. Because succession is unsettled, a ruler must treat every capable subordinate as a rival, which drives out talent and makes the government worse over time. Because the ruler's departure is undated, nobody can plan around it. And because removal requires force, the periods between rulers tend to be violent and to destroy more than the original misrule did. The argument concludes that an arrangement offering no peaceful means of correction cannot be superior to one that does, even when the ruler in question is as wise as the case for despotism supposes.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Defenders of enlightened despotism answer that peaceful removal is overrated when what replaces the government is no better, and that regular alternation can entrench failure by handing the same problems between parties that both refuse to address them. They add that hereditary and designated succession have settled transitions without violence for long stretches of history, so the dilemma of death or revolt is not intrinsic to one-person rule but a feature of particular regimes. They also argue that democracies have their own violent failures, including contested results and coups, so the contrast between orderly and disorderly transition is a matter of degree.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A government should be judged on its whole record rather than on its worst moment, and an arrangement that governs well for long stretches may be preferable to one that recovers quickly from failures it causes more often. [Rejecting P2] Voting a government out replaces the personnel without necessarily correcting the error, and alternation can entrench a failure that successive parties both decline to address. [Rejecting P3] Designated and hereditary succession has produced orderly transitions over long periods, and democracies have their own contested results and coups, so the contrast is a difference of degree. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that autocracy handles transition worse, which is one criterion among several rather than the decisive one.