Democracy Must Not Be Allowed to Self-Terminate
By which I mean, if a democracy votes in favor of dispensing with itself and becoming a non-democratic form of government—if it is the wish of the people for their future wishes to be disregarded, and that they should instead be ruled absolutely—then that particular wish of the people must be refused. The only autocratic action not only tolerable, but necessary, for a democratically elected government to undertake: it must preserve democracy, even in defiance of democracy, if necessary.
For this I give the following two reasons:
If the people decide democratically that they no longer wish to decide things democratically, then for the government to refuse to cease to respect democratic decisions is actually a rejection of a democratic decision, and therefore should appease those who call for the rejection of democratic decisions. It's a "this statement is false" sort of paradox. If you ask for autocratic rule, and the government declares autocratically that there won't be autocratic rule even though you asked for it, then you got what you asked for. If the people vote to end democracy, then the government's response ends democracy if and only if it does not end democracy. Put another way, voting in favor of doing away with the vote is an action that has no possible logical meaning. It is nonsense. It sounds like it means something, and what it sounds like it means is exactly what fascists want. But it doesn't actually mean that. It doesn't actually mean anything. It can't; basic propositional logic forbids it. You may as well be Pinocchio and inform the Blue Fairy that your nose is going to grow now. You may as well ask if a set of all sets that don't contain themselves contains itself. Such a motion by an electoral body is gibberish. Democracy does not have the authority to end democracy, for exactly the same reason that a single tier in a hierarchy of ordered metalanguages does not have the authority to make statements about its own semantics; for exactly the same reason that a Turing machine does not have the authority to ask whether a program in its own language will halt; for exactly the same reason that a formal logic does not have the authority to say, "I am consistent; I have proven it, by means of a proof written in myself." It just doesn't make sense.
Even supposing it did make any kind of logical sense for democracy to end democracy, it would not be fair; it would not be democratic. In a proper democracy, equal suffrage is extended to all of the governed. A vote to end democracy, then, is a vote to deny suffrage to all people forevermore thenceforth. That is, if the motion carries, then the vote of anyone who lives in the future will not count at all, and therefore will not count even nearly as much as the vote of anyone who lives in the present. That is unequal suffrage of the governed. Therefore, it is not democratic. A passing vote to end democracy must be discounted, because if it is to be put into effect, then at the time the vote passes, people who will live in the future will retroactively not have been going to be able to vote later, as convoluted as the verb tense may be in that phrase. That is, if a passing vote to end democracy is put into effect, then retroactively it will immediately have been invalid. What of the vote of the future people your vote will oppress? It was not counted. They did not consent. Ordinarily, people in the future of a democratic decision are granted their equal say in that decision by being able to motion to preserve or overturn it. If a vote passes to end democracy, those people in the future will not be able to motion to overturn that then-past vote, which means in effect that passing a vote to end democracy is discriminatory against future people. A quorum achieved by counting votes in a discriminatory way is inherently illegitimate.
As such, if, for example, Donald Trump, who has expressly stated his intention to impose presidential dictatorship, is reelected—even if he is reelected legitimately, by the will of the people—then in order to protect American democracy, he must be deposed: by the military if necessary, and, if they refuse, then by foreign militaries. The people do not have the authority to decide that the people do not have the authority to decide.