England. Henry VIII and Cromwell.
France. Napoleon and Petain.
Czechoslovakia, Poland, E. Germany, Hungary, Rumania, etc. USSR.
Germany. The Nazis.
Japan.
S. Korea. Rhee.
Greece. Metaxas and the colonels, among others.
Mexico. Various, but most notably Diaz.
Chile. Allende and Pinochet.
Most Latin American countries have gone thru cycles of dictatorship and (sort of) democracy, as have many Asian countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, etc.
Iraq. Saddam.
It's a very long list. Very few countries have a continuous history of freedom as we do. And every old country had to take its liberties, generally by force, from tyrants, because tyrants used to rule everywhere.
I can only speak to the history that I know but int he case of Napoleon, nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Iraq, the people did not get their freedom back. Never. The people were liberated by an external military force from a moral nation that believed in liberation over conquest.
In 3 of those cases, the liberating force was America. When America falls by the wayside as a free nation, who is going to be the world’s liberating force? Do you suppose China will come and be our liberators? I highly doubt it.
Even in the case of the Iron Curtain, America was still the liberating force. We liberated Eastern Europe with economic pressure rather than military warfare.
I was making the point that we are heading toward socialist tyranny and there has never been the free democratic nation that could vote itself back from tyranny. The cycle, as you pointed odut in some of your examples, is that the nation has to go through a period of opression and tyranny before it again musters the spiritual courage to fight with arms against its oppressors and win back its freedom.
Never has their been a nation that voted itself into opression and then voted itself back out. The oppressors prevent it.