Wherever there’s politics, then, there’s the so-called law of oligarchy, the fact that even in liberal democracies, the most efficient use of political power is the dictatorship, as when an effectively sovereign leader declares a state of exception.

From the linked article:

Robert Michels spelled out the iron law of oligarchy in the first decade of the 20th century.... Michels argued that organizational oligarchy resulted, most fundamentally, from the imperatives of modern organization: competent leadership, centralized authority, and the division of tasks within a professional bureaucracy. These organizational imperatives necessarily gave rise to a caste of leaders .... Michels supplemented this institutional analysis of internal power consolidation with psychological arguments.... Michels particularly emphasized the idea that elite domination also flowed from the way rank-and-file members craved guidance by and worshipped their leaders.

I suspect that Michels would be a more worthy foe than the benighted theist and Darwinist Smitt. Hobbes and de Maistre reacted to recent chaos without the benefit of all the things that revealed that their views were "preposterous." Newton spent his life trying to figure out how God had ordered the universe. What a dolt!

I don't see any reason to doubt that autocracy is more efficient than representative democracy. But, as Lord Acton essentially argued, autocracy is not sustainable, and sustainability trumps efficiency. But conservatives claim Acton as their own. Is he another dragon to be slayed?