Asklemmy

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 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.

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.

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.

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).

When is justice appropriate?

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.

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.

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 never appropriate.

We need socialism.

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.