¿Es cierto eso de que la gente no quiere que la tomen por tonta?

¿Que es lo peor que puede hacer un gobernante, especialmente si no es democrático?

No me queda tan claro.

Sí creo que la gente está dispuesta a renunciar a ciertas cosas para obtener otras que considera más importantes. De otra manera no se explica el éxito y la difusión del populismo clientelista en todo el mundo:

We argued that the supposed attractions of authoritarian "stability" are in fact illusory, since nothing is more volatile and unsafe than dictatorship, which lacks any self-critical method for learning from its mistakes. Earlier "people power" episodes, in Asia in the early 1980s and in Eastern Europe in 1989, as well as in the general repudiation of military rule in Latin America and the peaceful liberation of South Africa, had definitively proved this point. They had also left the Arab regions looking rather conspicuous, and rather backward, in consequence. In the long term, this sense of being relegated to infancy and immaturity has had a salutary effect, which one hopes will outlast the temptations—of the immature culture of self-pity and victimhood, plus the equally false reassurances of theocracy—that are certain to arise now that the period of enforced adolescence is over.