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can you think of a democracy that really prospered financially over last 20yrs? Russia was much more liberal before 2014, was not a threat to anyone, and was not aligned
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Apologies for answering only this part of your post, but the rest is basically a re-statement of you views, so I would have to re-state mine and so on...
Most seasoned democratic countries have experienced GDP growth, that you can take as a proxy of "financial prosperity" (what is that exactly for you? GPD, GPD per capita, disposable income, health, life expectancy?)
https://news.mit.edu/2019/study-democracy-fosters-economic-growth-acemoglu-0307https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_and_economic_growthDemocratization of a country from a non-democratic regime is usually preceded by a fall in GDP, and a volatile but expected growth in the long run. On the other hand, authoritarian regimes experience significant growth at the beginning and decline in the long run.[4] The cause of such behavior is that non-democratic regimes, mainly authoritarian ones, are more effective at implementing decisive policies and choices as well as solving ethnic and sub-national conflicts, but are unsustainable in the long run as there is more incentive to extract money from society which in turn leads to less prosperity.