This is who I was about to mention. He was known as a “benevolent dictator.” Among other things, he stood up to Hitler, and he kept Yugoslavia united (compared to that mess after his death).
Are there 20th century examples of dictators who were good leaders and better than elected polticos?
Nobody’s mentioned Gorbachev yet?
Besides most of the people mentioned earlier (Park Chung Hee, Lee Kuan Yew, Ataturk, Tito, and arguably even Franco) I might add in Chiang Kai-Shek (at least after he retreated to Formosa), the Shah of Iran [1], Ian Smith [2], and the Castro brothers.
[1] At least compared to the current Islamic Republic, he wasn’t better than Mossadegh obviously
[2] Technically democratically elected although the electorate consisted of a tiny proportion of the Rhodesian population
Post #38.
This is an analogue of Gaudere’s Rule. If anyone comes into a thread to say “I can’t believe no one’s mentioned yet!”, it will have been mentioned many posts earlier.
But it was also, before the Civil War, headed in several other directions at once, including Communism (an ideology at once respectful and disrespectful of nationalism but tending strongly to disrespectful, being an ideology liberationist but also essentially internationalist), and democratic socialism (in which nationalism is a thing negotiable), and even anarcho-syndicalism (the which kindasorta transcends nationalism, insofar as nationalism requires national governments). As to the latter, see the Spanish Revolution (which Franco did not need to put down, because the nominally Communist government of the Republic already had done it, at Stalin’s insistence, because Stalin did not like that kind of revolution and the Republic needed Stalin’s military aid to survive).
So he was in some sense an elected leader, but why was he a good leader?
Not 20th Century, and, more importantly, never a dictator. The Athenian democracy only allowed for a leader who had popular support at the moment, and Pericles was always in danger of losing it, and never tried to subvert that system nor to make himself Strategos-for-Life, let alone Archon-for-Life. A tyrannos Pericles was not.
Yassir Arafat?
Was he ever a dictator of anything?
The wonders of our perfect bomb are very strange to tell,
It doesn’t only change the guns, it changes hearts as well.
An instant of exposure to its penetrating ray,
Will turn a Yassar Arafat into a Danny Kay.
Although, actually, that might be a comparison that unfairly credits Danny Kay, the evil bastard.
Primo de Rivera, although he wasn’t an absolute dictator in the sense that he had a king above him, and in fact it was the King who set up the dictatorship. He also never intended to be a dictator-for-life. His economic policies left a lot to be desired, but his take on “criticism of one’s superiors”, another thing for which he gets criticised, isn’t very different from the attitudes of the civilian politicians of the time. The turn-taking system he replaced was completely fucked up; as for the Second Republic, let me just say I agree with sailor’s assessment of it.
Re the transition to democracy, Franco’s line of having left everything atado y bien atado (“tied, and tied tightly”) when he accepted the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Don Juan Carlos has been a joke for going on 40 years. Transition president Adolfo Suárez was Don Juan Carlos’ Gordian sword; he’s a distant relative of mine and I still remember how much my family laughed when he was selected, because they knew he was not going to stay Falange for any longer than it took to change from that blue shirt to a nice suit.
If Ho Chi Minh is in, include any other genocidal dictator. His land reforms, pre-death, seem to have taken quite a toll in human lives.
WTF came up with Ho? Too much, you guys. Read Wikipedia, for starters.
Well Rhodesia seemed to function then unlike to-day, so at the least Mr. Smith was less bad than Mugabe.
Actually, I meant the Egyptian president Anwar Saddat.
D’oh! 
I would give another vote to Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore as it is hard to find much opposition for his benevolent and successful rule. Sure, there are democratic institutions in Singapore, but seeing the ruling party with complete control for so many decades makes it a little bit hard to take them seriously as a democracy.
IMHO a similar situation happened in Mexico with the almost omnipotent PRI party that ruled for ages, many do not think that that long ruling (of 71 years, until an opposition party finally won in the previous election) deserved to be called a democracy. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa called the government under the PRI as la dictadura perfecta (“the perfect dictatorship”).
Exactly my point. Thank you for agreeing.
I find the notion of government “legitimacy” rather silly and useless. I, and I believe most people, want a government that works not a government which is “legitimate”.
It used to be God himself who imparted legitimacy to governments so we have taken a step back if now it is “we the people” because “we the people” have been known to do some rather awful things whereas God’s will is inscrutable.
I find the notion that the votes of the people is the only thing which can lend legitimacy to a government is just as silly and naive as the notion that only God can lend legitimacy to a government.
For me the only legitimacy worth anything is whether a government does in fact work well. If it does I do not care who its parents were and if a government does not work at all then I do not care if it has the legitimacy of millions of votes.
For me, a government which increases the well-being, the real freedoms of their people and makes the world a better place, that government has all the legitimacy it needs.
A government should be judged on its own merits and not on how it came into being. It should be judged by whether it left the country in better or worse shape than when they took over, on comparable regimes in the same cultural environment, etc.
The Romans had god Janus who had two faces and saw things as they arrived and as they departed. Things have their time to arrive and their time to leave; this does not mean they were bad when they arrived.
Franco should be judged in comparison with the Republic which he replaced and with the communist regimes of the time because that is what he prevented in Spain. In that comparison he does not come out badly at all.
Some people might say his government was illegitimate because there were no elections. There were elections, just that they were rigged. Well, pretty much all elections are rigged, some more blatantly than others. The system in Spain today is rigged beyond anything which can be called legitimate and yet few people deny legitimacy to the Spanish government today.
People voted for the generals with their feet and arms: they fought for them. Franco’s regime was immensely popular and had great popular support (like Hitler and Mussolini). It is just not politically correct these days to acknowledge this.
But, if you were a Spaniard born around the turn of the century and all you had known was chaos, instability, political upheaval and assasinations then a few decades of a stable, repressive, authoritarian regime looked pretty good in comparison. And those were the people doing the judging.
The same thing happens when (simple) western people judge the Chinese regime. They make the mistake of believing that because they do not come out of a western-style election they are not legitimate and therefore the Chinese people do not want them. In the meanwhile the Chinese people care not a whit about western style legitimacy, they want a government that works and on the whole the Chinese government is working out pretty well for them.
And yet western cultures want to believe western style voting democracy is the only legitimate system and all others must eventually disappear. And yet those “illegitimate” governments have the gall of not only not disappearing but some of them making some pretty good progress.
OK, two people have nominated Kemel Ataturk. I have two words for them: Armenian genocide. Ataturk did not START the genocide, but he definitely COMPLETED it. So for Armenian Turks, I would say Ataturk was NOT a good dictator, bureaucrat, or human being.
No, sir, because neither you nor I have yet demonstrated that the tendency of the Second Republic was to divide Spain into a multiplicity of nation-states. Where are you getting that, anyway?!
Re Chiang Kai-shek, he was a brutal loser.
I would look towards whomever was the last dictator before democracy, when the dictator wanted the transition – especially if the dictator was then freely elected. Most of the these people are not well-known because they weren’t famously brutal as dictators. That’s why they were able to get elected.
Someone earlier mentioned the first elected leader of Costa Rica.
For Taiwan, the name of the good last dictator and first elected head of state is Lee Teng-hui.
Of course, if the dictator subsequently won a free election, then, by definition, they were not “better than elected politicos.”
Which brings us back to Queen Victoria, on grounds of abolishing monarchical interference with parliament and then living until 1901. She was never elected after she stopped dictating, but if the UK had elections for head of state, she would have won
As also mentioned before, Gorbachev is a reasonable choice for the honor. I can’t say due to uncertainly as to how much of the brutality during his reign was his fault. Maybe none. He subsequently tried to become an “elected politico” but failed.