I suspect that people like you require the personal experience of having a loved one black-bagged in the middle of the night without recourse to understand OP's position. Every authoritarian regime ever uses the same logic to build up their police state: "for the greater good".
The US has 2.5x the incarceration rate of China, and 1.8x the incarceration rate of Russia. How's that for "authoritarian regime"? Or is this "different" somehow?
While the incarceration rate of the US is atrocious, the prisoners (for the most part) have access to the legal/judicial system and are covered by things like habeas corpus, right to a speedy trial, right to counsel, visitation rights, etc.
Also, for the most part, prisons in the US don’t practice torture and political reprogramming. Nor are there concentration camps with indefinite detention save for a handful of black sites like Guantanamo.
People have gotten years-long prison sentences (which are de facto death sentences with regularity) in Russia for donating a few bucks to Ukraine or speaking out against the war. Nothing comparable happens in the US (for now).
Democracy tends to require a revolution to break free from those authoritarian regimes, to say nothing of thousands (or millions) of deaths along the way. And we're still waiting for Russia, China, Cuba, etc. to reveal their glorious democratic forms. (By your logic, communism must be one of humanity's greatest achievements since it elevated a number of feudal countries to superpower status. Nevermind the millions of dead in famines, gulags, genocides, etc. But hey, at least crime rates were low!)
Many countries transitioned to democracy without a major revolution. And even when they did, virtually all reused the same state infrastructure that was established during the monarchy.
Communism was a failure because it was incompetent. But the authoritarian-capitalist government China has had since the late 1980s was nothing short of a miracle.
In the 1970s, China was as poor per capita as Bangladesh. Today, Bangladesh is still a deeply impoverished country, while China is an advanced middle income economy.
Soviet Russia under its most authoritarian leader rapidly industrialized, defeated Nazi Germany, developed nuclear weapons, dramatically raised the levels of literacy and education across the entire population, and became a global superpower. That sounds like a smashing success to me.
