Yep, as long as a "strong, smart" dictator is in power things can move along fine, but the second he shows cracks in his armor plate all the people he has fucked over, berated, imprisoned are waiting in the wings to take him down, and then you get instability. That's one reason China was able to survive. Although it's an authoritarian one-party country, the CCP was smart enough to eject the leader every so many years, they threw away that advantage with Xi and declared him dictator for life. Democracies are messy, but they can also be self-correcting by not letting power aggregate for too long around one cult of personality.

> A totalitarian state is prone to falling apart - the USSR is a prime example.

That's taken as an article of faith, but I'm not sure how true it actually is. Sure some totalitarian have fallen apart (the Soviet Union), but others have not (China), and Western liberal democracies aren't looking so stable nowadays.

Totalitarian regimes have a fundamental problem: succession. Very few empires cracked that nut.

Can you list the liberal democracies that aren't doing so well?

I'd point out Greece, Italy, Argentina and Brazil. I'm sure there's a no-true-scotsman argument to be had for each of them, but they're nominally considered democratic republics.

Looks like these bureaucrats hold a big chunk of the national sovereignty for someone whose not subject to a popular vote, and this job is for life?