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Democracy is always good except if what is put to a vote is whether human beings deserve rights or not. Human rights are unappealable, period.
Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is never good, and anyone who says otherwise is a bootlicker, a privileged class or an authoritarian leader.
Valid but counter point, popular vote is always easily influenceable, leading to counter productive results, and sometimes leads to psuedodemocracy which is authoritarian in all but name.
There is no good autocracy and no perfect democracy, but you cannot discredit both.
Short bursts of autocracy when necessary and done right(altruistic leader with accountability who steps down) leads to a lasting democracy
altruistic leader with accountability who steps down
That is traditional leadership, and leadership is one thing and authoritarianism is quite another.
A leader does not have to be authoritarian. A leader works best when they delegates functions and distributes power horizontally. The leader is not the one who knows more but the one who is more focused.
In authoritarianism, the despot is "the alpha and the omega", the top of the pyramid and the highest authority, regardless of the scope. He is the one who has the last word, even if what he says is bullshit. There is no form of authoritarianism that is mild or "altruistic".
I grant you that the population is easy to manipulate, but that is precisely because of the dependence on authority figures, people trust more in what their "leader" tells them than in their own judgment.
The solution is to educate the population so that it is less prone to manipulation, not to continue doing the same as always.
Society should exist for the sole purpose of bettering the lives of all of its members. Anything that goes against that is inappropriate in my book. Right now democracy is going against that pretty hard in the US.
When is justice appropriate?
I don't understand. What are you saying?
Authoritarianism is fundamentally unjust as a form of government.
Even asking that question is borderline bad faith.
All forms of government are "Authoritarian".
Autocracy is convenient when the leader is wise and just. Sadly, even if we found one, they're not genetic traits. Democracy is convenient in any other case, but it's harder to properly implement compared to autocracy.
You need both. Democracy and authoritarianism. Democracy so the people rule, and authority so it stays that way.
So you're just asking when is it okay for you to give up being a part of society and giving total control to the fascists?
Because the answer, literally every time, is going to be "never." You should never give in to authoritarianism. You should actively make it harder for "them" to bring you and anyone else down like this. You should be working harder to uplift your neighbors and communities.
What if it's an authority that you trust, like a doctor?
Is authoritarianism good then?
that's neither authority nor authoritarianism. you're conflating multiple different meanings so you can shift the goalposts on the sly. a doctor can give you advice, and if you're wise, you'll heed it out of respect for her hard-earned expertise, but she doesn't have authority. she isn't empowered to force you to do anything. even being involuntarily committed is generally something done by courts, not doctors; the doctors are merely required to carry out the courts orders.
It's a matter of circumstance. Authoritarianism is only useful in situations where time pressures make the slow, deliberate decisions of democracy unworkable. Combat is a good example of this. When the shells are raining down around you, there isn't really time to hold a vote on how to proceed. So, in such situations there is usually a chain of command which is given authoritarian control. Other emergent situations will also often require similar levels of top-down control. The person in charge may not make the best or fairest decisions in the heat of the moment. But, inaction will almost certainly be a worse choice.
The other side of this is, when the situation isn't emergent, a democratic (well, really semi-democratic, but I'm going to use "democratic") system is likely the best choice. And those democratic systems would be wise to prepare for the emergent situations by identifying and designating the people who will be handed dictatorial control when the fecal matter hits the air circulator. And the system for identifying when the emergency has ended, how dictatorial power is unwound and how the performance of the person handed that power is to be judged.
The reason I hedged with "semi-democratic" is that a truly democratic system can have issues too. The classic "tyranny of the majority" problem. As any majority could override the rights of a minority in a truly horrible fashion. The solution being things like constitutional democracies, where the power of the majority is limited in specific ways (e.g. unrevokable rights).
Scale is the factor here. You could say that small places can benefit from a sort of benevolent authoritarianism. I'm thinking Singapore, Liechtenstein, Monaco. None of them are bigger than a postage stamp and the population will go along with it. The bigger the country, the more injustices authoritarianism accumulates, the harder it is to keep people in line, the more suppressive it becomes.
Ideally, democracy trumps everything. It is the only system that has the built-in power to cancel itself. It needs all the people to be aware and to participate accordingly. It's not perfect. It's not always fair either. But I'd rather live in a system that can decide to end itself than in a system that would try to end me if I wanted to be critical about it.
Democracy is not automatically "good". Democracy is a tool. When applied in an appropriate way and to an appropriate voter base (one informed and smart enough to, on average, make a correct vote), it's a great decision-making tool. It also has the ability to empower a larger number of people, which has real tangible benefits. When applied in an inappropriate way... well just look around. Most liberal democracies have just become a pay-to-win competition for the mega-rich to launder their dictatorship though.
I say this as someone who has designed and run democratic projects, and someone who is generally pro-democracy, yet against most existing "democratic countries".
It's also important to note historical cases like the 1917 October Revolution, where there became an interesting question of whether a liberal democracy was more important than putting power in the hands of the working class - the second option was closer to the goals of an ideal democracy, despite appearing to be an anti-democratic authoritarian seizure of power. Consider alternative cases, like democracies which have allowed right-wing authoritarians to legally gain large amounts of power (e.g. Hitler, Trump) and whether it was more important to preserve a malfunctioning liberal democracy or to prevent a harmful regime taking over.
Democracy is only appropriate when the society in question is willing to accept the results of a democratic vote. If divisions in the society are so ingrained that this doesnt happen, then democracy doesn't work.
Democracy is good when it can't be completely subverted by a couple of rich international oligarchs spending billions of dollars in a dedicated mass media campaign over a period of decades that beams a literal firehose of lies, half-truths, and the glazing of any person/organization that willingly assists them and does everything in their power to destroy and denigrate anything that even comes close to undermining them at the cost of factual reality directly into the eyeballs of anyone who owns a screen....
But other than that democracy is generally preferred, yes.
these are really abstract concepts that have no material basis in reality, what you're really asking is: "is the dictatorship of the sword by capital (democracyβ’) preferred to the dictatorship of the sword by the people (authoritarianism)?", in which i much prefer the latter.
people being able to put a ballot in a box =/= people having power
Autocracy is a toin coss, which makes the idea itself naive.
Democracy is always the answer. Mass influence by algorithm needs to be outlawed immediately.
So far, base democracy in highly federated systems is the fairest I've seen. Sadly, fairness isnt the measurement our world evonomy goes by. That needs to change.