The notion of democracy is largely idealistic, not largely realistic, because a good
“-cracy” (form of government) at large scale has differentiated the constitutive will of the people (demos) into procedural and expert systems which most persons dimly understand, let alone having a direct role in best policy formation and evaluation of better consequences. Societies can’t be governed by polling.

So, there are systems of electoral fairness, systems of policy formation, systems of legislating, managing, and evaluating.

Understanding the intricacies of complex governance requires political studies professionsals, political scientists, political theorists, public policy specialists, etc.

An organization is literally democratic only relative to the effectiveness of that organization (relatively small organizations) through the consensual decisions of its members. But to say that a particular organization’s membership is a demos is metaphorical, contrary to an original intent of national constitution formation to be considering large-scale population. Democratic ideas model a society valuing democratic tendencies, but that’s based on the appeal of small-scale interaction, scaled up imaginatively (without understanding of large-scale realities).

We could credibly argue that an elected city council is democratic, more so than
a collection of elected county supervisors (whose specialized engagements are largely unknown to the electorate), which is more democratic than a state assem-
bly or senate. Accountability is ensured by more specialists, details of which most persons have little interest. Mostly, people just want “things” to work to their advantage reliably because their lives are time-constrained (no thanks to under-paid jobs). Democracy is a ficitonal theater, an ideality which is good for compar-
ative assessment of real organizations, which are shaped by “playwrights” (legis-
lators, policy wonks, judicial precedent, etc.) who should be rigorously receptive to public interest, beyond ensuring fair election of The Elect.

Across communities, regions, states, and nations, we make the multi-leveled systems work fairly well. “Democracy” is goodG government nowadays for very complex societies. It tends, at best, to balance the openness of distributed organization (re: the trope of town “square” type of causality in sustainable organization) and formality (hierarchy) of organization (re: the trope of pyramidal or “tower”-ed type of causality in sustainable organization): the square and the tower, but not the square versus the tower (which tends to be autocratic).

Managing the “and” (the fruitful balance} is difficult, to say the least. But balanc-
ing idealism and realism—balancing demophilic receptiveness and meritocatic responsiveness—is what political pragmatism has always been about, and learning never ends for evolving humanity.

But we do it in mature “democracies.” As Harris said in her recent interview (mentioned twice in discussion yesterday), leadership must: “build consensus [because] it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems.” That’s a matter of the small-scale components of grandly plural life, contributing to multi-level and broad-scale engagement over time, relative to resource constraints defined by budget specialists and special interest constituencies.

Political powers which can’t develop and sustain The Balance, who can’t “do” “democracy,” can easily caricature good government as chaotic and unsustainable. But that dismissal is a hidden admission that such powers don’t know how to evolve good government: openly receptive (demophilic) and aptly responsive (meritocratic).

You can see here that political considerations work better in terms of “good government” than with the trope of “democracy.” To make practcial sense of wanting “democracy,” a person has to detail how that is desirable (good) govern-
ment because we want the latter result in terms of the degree of demophilic recep-
tiveness in levels or/and modes of communicative life; and in terms of the degree of expert responsiveness in levels or/and modes of complex systems.

In a recent X posting, I asked “Can democracy be autocratic?” Better: Can good government be autocratic?

“Of course not,” I said. What followed—which doesn’t exactly fit with what I’ve sketched above (but is useful here)—can be read as themes for elaborating a better sense of good government as demophilic meritocracy.