Democracy fails...

[Dystopia]

Do you have a historical example of a benevolent dictator? I find it difficult to believe one ever existed

That's probably because you don't have a clearly thought out concept of what constitute benevolence. Instead you rely on feelings, which leads you to be over-optimistic about the potency of some favored attributes, and fail to account for the necessity of other disliked attributes under relevant circumstances.

---

Before answering such relative question one needs to define benevolent - What is benevolent? Is it merely according to the principles of liberalism and human rights (something that by its very nature doesn't exist)? I would say that benevolent depends on each person's morality. My dad liked living during the dictatorship in Portugal, he genuinely thought the times were better back then, so I guess there's no absolute perspective. Let's look at Mussolini - Was he bad for the opposition? Yeah, but he did help Italy at least in the first years and the population supported him.

My final perspective is that dictatorship V democracy depends on historical and cultural context and thus one cannot be better than the other without taking into account other variables and mentalities. Maybe in 200 years we will be living in dictatorships, but obviously we are limited right now and thus we cannot think ahead of time just like humans before 1748 couldn't predict that something like liberalism would ever exist. And this without mentioning that there are many forms of democracy and dictatorship to make a definitive stance, and possibly in the future new political conceptions will exist

A benevolence according to some principle likely already overlooks practical impact of "benevolence".

I would ask instead why is benevolence necessary? Are democracies benevolent? Our laws might be, but democracy in itself is not meant to be benevolent but fair