Beyond campaign financing, the US also has gerrymandering, voter suppression and disproportionate voting like the electoral college. And fixing those things will make the nation better serve it's people by making it more democratic.
Comparing these dictatorships to each other is not meaningful, we would need to compare dictatorship to democracy. Tudor England was better off than medieval England: not a very high bar. For one thing religious executions still happened and there are certainly no written troves of commoners praising the new age.
Elizabethan England was certainly inferior to the Italian renaissance republics of the period. And its people worse of than the latter democratic UK. It is less of a leap forward than 5th century Athens or even 19th century UK. The nearest semi-democracy in time and space would be recently independent Holland which had more freedom and growth: it is even where the American Pilgrims initially fled to. Even among dictatorships, Elizabeth I is not that great: equally despotic Spain had more power, technology and culture, Arab and Asian nations had longer life spans, more sanitation and higher literacy.
To compare democracy vs dictatorship you'd need to countries similar in culture and era. Like North and South Korea.
Comparing these dictatorships to each other is not meaningful, we would need to compare dictatorship to democracy. Tudor England was better off than medieval England: not a very high bar. For one thing religious executions still happened and there are certainly no written troves of commoners praising the new age.
Elizabethan England was certainly inferior to the Italian renaissance republics of the period. And its people worse of than the latter democratic UK. It is less of a leap forward than 5th century Athens or even 19th century UK. The nearest semi-democracy in time and space would be recently independent Holland which had more freedom and growth: it is even where the American Pilgrims initially fled to. Even among dictatorships, Elizabeth I is not that great: equally despotic Spain had more power, technology and culture, Arab and Asian nations had longer life spans, more sanitation and higher literacy.
To compare democracy vs dictatorship you'd need to countries similar in culture and era. Like North and South Korea.