“as if mass opinion that values the views of twenty McDonalds employees over one learned man (or nineteen learned man) is superior”

Democracy may not always come up with the right answers, but it certainly comes up with the fairest. Therefore, if the people of a democratic country do happen to make a bad choice, they have no-one but themselves to blame. This freedom to make a mistake or two is so important, as opposed to being a slave to the power of your neighbor.

“If a man is incapable of properly serving the State and bettering society, he should be removed. He can leave quietly and retire, or he can refuse and be shot.”

In theory, that’s fine, but as history has proven time and time again, fascist governments rarely “leave quietly and retire”. At least in a democracy, a reigme is accountable to its people and can be removed after it has served its term in power. Fascist governments tend to malinger on for many years, much like the Goldenbaum dynasty, passing on power within, to friends and blood-relatives, rather than to those worthy of the responsibility.

“In such a government, there is little of the petty arguing that is undeniably rampant in democracy. Things are done in the best interests of the people, for they make up the State, without weeks of argument.”

You’re putting too much faith in one man. Lohengramm was an excellent leader, but what if, one day, he were to suddenly decide that all people with black hair should be executed? In such a government, fascist dictators have to the power to impose such a rule. Your very life is subject to the whims of one man. The whole point of democracy is that it doesn’t merely represent only one man’s belief, but that of an entire country (calculated by fair consensus).

If that’s not a flaw of democracy, what is?

What the proponents of democracy like to envision is a state in which the world is idealised and ambition and ignorance are minimal at best.
The truth, sadly, is that the vast masses of ordinary men are not wise, and elected officials are often ambitious and self serving.

One could, obviously, say that this is so in autocracy, save that there is no way to dislodge the incompetent leaders. I disagree. If a man is incapable of properly serving the State and bettering society, he should be removed. He can leave quietly and retire, or he can refuse and be shot. Brutal, but necessary. A body cannot survive without an immune system.

In such a government, there is little of the petty arguing that is undeniably rampant in democracy. Things are done in the best interests of the people, for they make up the State, without weeks of argument. Without the grasping vines of unrestrained free market capitalism reaching into every crack in the foundation, weakening the government. Such a system is vastly superior to democracy; such a system is embodied in Lohengramm’s Empire.

Excellent dissection of Reinhard’s rise to replace the dwindling Goldenbaum dynasty. As Cameron Probert says, the Alliance’s system seems to have serious problems, but it does at least have some kind of egalitarian ideal.

Perhaps democracies are always falling short of a situation where the people really govern themselves – consider the proportion of MPs who are Oxbridge graduates – and perhaps they tend to be militarily weaker than more restrictive societies. But if a democracy is conquered by a dictatorship I would feel like saying, as one might of a person, that the defeated state was ‘too good for this world’.