Democracy requires courage not merely from institutions, but from citizens themselves. To live democratically means accepting responsibility. You cannot simply worship a leader as though politics were a secular religion. You must participate, argue, persuade, organize, and tolerate defeat. The authoritarian temperament wants to escape from this burden. It seeks the comforting fiction of the infallible father figure - the leader who alone can fix everything, punish enemies, and relieve the masses of the inconvenience of thinking. That impulse is infantile. Democracy is adulthood.
Which is why every dictator eventually wraps himself in the language of strength while ruling through fear. If your system cannot survive a newspaper column, a comedian on light night TV making fun of you, a cartoon, a rival party, or an inconvenient election result, then your system is not strong. It is brittle. And brittle things will shatter.
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