Define "Democracy" for me. It pretty much can mean anything.

In a purely technical sense all "Democracy" means is "Government derived from the people".

This is opposed to things like "Monarchy" which is typically government derived from hereditary, "Oligarchy" which is government derived from elite families, or "Theocracy" which is government derived from a religious group.

Which means that Nazism, Fascism, Syndicalism, are all technically democracies. Chinese government is a democracy as was the Soviet regime in Communist Russia. etc etc.

Why? Because they are all examples of government derived from "the people". The people in charge of these sorts of regimes are not chosen based on what family they are born to or taken from church leaders or anything like that. It is done based on people moving up through the ranks of various political parties, which are not only derived from the people but membership is almost a hard requirement for any sort of political power at all and open to virtually anybody who is a citizen of the state.

Hell if you go and read Fascist literature from Italy in the 1930s they sometimes considered themselves the ultimate form of Democracy because they made absolutely no distinction between "The State" and "The people". Every single person was part of the government, literally.

Mussolini and friends considered most forms of European Parliamentary Democracy as shams. Claimed that they are nothing but thinly veiled Oligarchies (more or less) that used the trappings of a democratic state to sucker the average person.

Which, not ironically, is a view shared by many forms of revolutionary or radical socialists to this day. Not ironically because Fascism (as it actually existed in Italy during the interwar period) was derived from radical leftist syndicalism. The term Fascism is derived from Fasci, which was a popular term used to label revolutionary worker leagues and unions from the 1920s and earlier in Italy.

My point being that "Democracy" is a big tent concept that is shared by lots of different people with lots of different views.

The connection between Democracy and Tyrannical rule was well established since Greek times. Where they had, on smaller scales, several instances of Democratic city states devolving into Tyrannical ones. Which is something that happened more a few times in history, even 20th century at a larger scale.

If you listen too much to the "Democracies never went to war with each other" and "we need to export Democracy" you'd come away with this impression that Democracy is some sort of mystical metaphysical Empress whose as soon as she drapes her magical power over a country means that they can secure freedom and liberation for ever and ever and solve all problems and eliminate all wars.

This is, of course, nonsense.

Now of course if you want to qualify it by saying "Liberal Democracy", then we are getting somewhere.

But "Liberal" used to mean "Individual Liberty".. that is private property rights and rule of universal laws.

American Libertarianism IS Liberalism, in a classical sense. It didn't mean social liberalism as practiced to day, nor old socialist libertarianism.

So in the context of LIbertarianism a Liberal Democracy and Libertarian government are the same thing.

When we talk about Republics, which are desirable, we are talking about "Rule of Law", not "rule of the people". "The Law" being a classical philosophical concept in which laws are derived from nature. That is laws created by man's nature interacting with other men in a natural world. Not laws created by legislator or sovereign governmental fiat.

Which, when you go to school, you are told is a obsolete concept and no longer relevant to anybody except to wingnuts and the uneducated.

So what exactly is Democracy in the modern sense? What is it as it actually exists.

Most, except for very small states, Democratic Government is a form of Administrative Corporatist state. It is rule by administrative bureaucracy that works with large publicly owned corporations and other economic interests to run a country. People are able to vote, but the actual rule makers and people that make decisions and design how the government is actually ran are derived from a special class of highly educated people with political skill and connections that wormed their way up by navigating the complex internal politics of ultra massive governmental bureaucracies.

Is this really the model of ideal government that we want?

Because if you listen to the world's government that seeks to "export democracies" this is exactly what they want.

If you listen to radical socialists this is exactly the government they want, but it is only a "real democracy" if they are the ones in charge of it.

If you say that the people actually should have a large amount control over how the government operates they say that isn't real Democracy... that is "Populism" and populism is evil because it is vaguely Nazi-ish.

Needless to say that I don't think that the vast majority of people the want in any case. They don't want their lives to be ruled by corporate and administrative bureaucracies. They want self determination and a government that is extremely limited.

This sort of stuff is why it is possible to be against Democracy and for Democracy at the same time.