Ironically, you couldn't be more wrong. Let me try to flesh out the magic8ball bot's response.

"Dominance of government institutions by sociopaths, and their destruction of democratic institutions"(our current condition) =/= "democracy." Democracy is a system defined by strong democratic limits on government power. Republican limits on government power "call" or "refer to" democratic limits on government power.

This argument requires more clarification: Democratic limits on government power (limits based on brains that can engage in adaptive, adversarial, feedback-and-correction) are technically stronger than republican limits (limits defined by laws; + the now-marginalized "culture of freedom" that sees the value of those codified limits and respects them). To some extent, both are the same (the republic defines/calls democratic procedures by including them in Constitutional law; and Democratic choices/votes/actions often protect and strengthen fundamental constitutional laws). That said, the democratic limits bank on people having mirror neuron responses to unjust actions, and personal self-interest in their own property, or a personal unwillingness to tolerate government violation of their own rights, etc. ...Republican limits, on the other hand, require people to understand a complicated legal edifice or "framework of governance." Examples of democratic limits on government power are: (1) proper jury trials that inform the randomly-selected jury of their right to "veto" or "nullify" the law; (2) widespread suffrage in free and open elections where all candidates have easy access to the ballot (3) widespread rifle ownership, practiced marksmanship skill, and firearm carrying, (4) freedom of speech and commonplace political assembly in public. Examples of republican limits on government power are: (1a) Well-defined due process(such as the requirement of a valid "corpus delicti" in all cases) that the judge and prosecutor are supposed to be "bound to follow"(this has already failed, and, because the judge and prosecutor are sociopathic power-seekers, they collude with each other to overwhelm defense attorneys, and this collusion carries the threat of disbarment for defense attorneys who dare to properly defend their clients by pointing to the illegitimacy/corruption of the law), (2a) Clear limits on what the legislative and executive branches of the government may legislate or "order" (But this has been nullified or negated, again, by sociopathic conspiracy among the power-seekers, for example, by Congress voting repeatedly to abnegate their own duty to act as a limit on the other branches of government, such as by allowing war to be made by executive order, instead of congressional declaration, or by unconstitutional agencies like the FDA, DEA, and EPA circumventing due process, such as by unlawful search and seizure without jury trial) (3a) Clearly defined prohibition of legislation that interferes with gun ownership, practice, and carry (Second Amendment rights have been "infringed", abolished actually, at the federal level; judicially by the SCOTUS upholding the terrible and lawless 1934 "Miller" decision, and by the equally lawless '68 and '86 gun control acts passed by Congress; ...as well as by a patchwork of 2nd Amendment and 14th and 15th Amendment-violating laws passed by the States), (4a) Though the freedom of speech and assembly are allegedly protected by the First Amendment, the power to tax slowly incentivized the abolition of these rights on "private"(but Pell Grant and Stafford Loan financed) universities that pretend to be "open campuses" that "tolerate and encourage" free speech. (Of course, they only "tolerate and encourage" such "open discourse" when the political speech is ineffectual, and any petitions are legally non-binding. The very instant you are putting anti-government candidates on the ballot, or have a legally-binding initiative petition that opposes the status quo, you will get attacked by campus police carrying real guns, night-sticks, batons, and pepper spray. ...As Berkeley protestors recently found out. So much for "free speech" and even less "freedom of assembly."

While it's true that the non-lettered "democratic" limits are also gone, there is a key difference between them and the republican limits: the democratic limits on government power function as limits even if not one single power-seeking sociopathic office-holder participates in the limiting action. Said another way: democratic limits depend solely on the participation of non-office-holding empaths; of the common citizen. Additionally, they don't require such "common citizens" to be well-educated in the law, or particularly knowledgeable about the theoretical ways that the separation of powers can limit overall government power. Instead, democratic limits on government power simply require basic morality from the common citizen, as well as a willingness to engage in the defense of individual freedom.

Sadly, this last has, thus far, been too much to ask of people who were indoctrinated by government schools as children. Morality has, thus far, been beyond such people. ...But I hold out some hope that this might change in the near future; preferably before I die.

The greatest enemies of human freedom are the idiots who put forth uneducated arguments in favor of individual freedom. (I'm looking at you, Hoppe.) Democracy isn't "a god that failed," it's a god that was quickly murdered, and then had his rotting skin worn as a mask for the idiotic masses. If the idiotic masses, libertarians included, are fooled by a rotting dead-skin mask, with no real "democracy" of any kind, then has democracy failed?

No. It simply was never tried.

In Hoppe's "Democracy: The God That Failed," he points out that nearly all legislation is illegitimate and unnecessary. (Specific responses can exist within a framework of interpretation of the common law's prohibitions on the initiation of force, without appeal to unearned, "false"(non-merit-based; coercively-recognized) "authority."

Democracy =/= "majoritarian suffrage alone."

Democracy is characterized by a whole host of linked limits on government power that are created by systems that "call" or "refer to" possible networked, capable, educated individuals as the highest power in the system.

So, maybe there are no networked, capable, educated individuals in the system! ...If this non-democracy then fails, it cannot be called democracy.

Indeed, the people who seem to have the most trouble understanding this are the same people who claim to want a coherent version of individual freedom: libertarians, classical liberals, and "anarchists."

For example, if government seizes control of education (as they did in the 1800s), and then is able to foist a central bank onto the general public due to their lack of education in Civics, History, Economics, Law, and Philosophy, has democracy failed? Perhaps. ...But it only failed to survive: it wasn't that the mechanisms of democracy were not "optimal."

I guess the problem I have with the claim that democracy has failed is that it's only ever expressed in a really, really, really stupid form, whereby "majoritarian suffrage" is conflated with "democracy."

For more information on a proper view of "democracy", see: http://www.democracydefined.org and http://www.fija.org

I'll close with a few comments from a biology-inspired view of individual freedom. Parasites comprise 3/4 of all life on Earth. When independent organisms find and exploit a new niche in nature, they dominate that niche until parasites dominate them. This means that, as intelligence increases, the real gains of intelligence are not usually reaped. After all, one doesn't "live the good life" while covered with parasites.

This does, however, perform an interesting beneficial function to the overall, very-long-term evolutionary motion of life: It provides an evolutionary pressure for all human-level or greater life to remain aware of the likelihood of sophisticated, even superhuman parasites. It also informs that later knowledge that sociopaths can band together to act as distributed parasites, in systems that are comprised of millions of nodes, and, thus, fault-tolerant with no "single failure points."

Is a government system comprised of inter-changeable sociopaths who are united by the goal of parasitic dominance really "alive"? Maybe not, maybe so. ...This is why it's not wise to call it a biological system. People get confused by terminology. However, it's not debatable that it's "a cybernetic system."

Humans (even wealthy ones) don't allocate adequate resources to dealing with parasitism. That's really the best way to summarize the recurring problem of totalitarianism or "tyranny."

The poor and disorganized are repeatedly left to deal with organized tyranny. The very few times this has not been the case, freedom has won.

We shouldn't forget Gerrit Smith. Gerrit Smith was every bit the hero that Lysander Spooner was. Gerrit was the wealthy abolitionist whose fungible resources paid Spooner to write "The Unconstitutionality of Slavery" and "An Essay On The Trial by Jury" http://www.lysanderspooner.org/biopgraphy/

Interestingly, Spooner was also the first to build a currency based on a blockchain (Not a technical blockchain, but a blockchain made of land, thus representing a stable store of value from mortgageholding speculators in the bank which could incentivize proper action on the part of the bank. Thus, all paper would correspond with land holdings of the bank and its co-creditors. This then, only allowed co-creditors to allocate money to government and improvement projects. ie: "If more security is needed to make an area safe, then we can either choose to make the area safe, or we can move operations out of that area and divert traffic around that area, eliminating the need to make it safe. In either case, common currency of the mortgage holders would incentivize the cheapest solution. If it was cheaper to make an area safe, because doing so would result in more trade revenues from that area, increasing land value and the corresponding value of the currency, then that would incentivize proper collective action from the locals, assigned by the trade of paper currency that could be traded and also recorded at the secured bank safe ...or, now, blockchain.)

The point is that collective governance (AS LONG AS IT IS VOLUNTARY AND INDEPENDENT) is capable of immense wisdom(ie: Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds").

So-called "anarchists" forget this (or never learn it) at their own peril.

If we wish to outperform and defeat this government, and leave its medusa-like head on a stake as a means toward off other exploitative sociopaths who might be likewise tempted to exploit naive "suffrage-only" views of democracy, then we must leverage the might of distributed democracy, and give equal power to all.

By granting power to the weak-but-properly-incentivized, we can displace sociopathic tyranny.

As a test to consider whether you understand what I've written, ask yourself: Which of the following actions would be "democratic" in the proper sense?

1. Giving all people in a despotism the ability to vote on "representatives" who then can make any law they wish with no possibility of accountability?
2. Giving all people in a despotism superior firearms to the police power in that despotism. (Preferably starting with the women, that they might shelter their children from rape and murder.)
3. Giving all people in a despotism superior defensive armaments that can only be rescinded by a 2/3 vote of people who are active on the network at the time of the vote.
4. Giving all people in a despotism proper jury trials, and teaching them how to limit government power, and why to limit government power

"Democracy" isn't the goal or outcome of anyone who seeks to become a "representative." Those who seek to be representatives because they find the job attractive are not psychologically "representative." ...Those who wish to use the power of office are sociopaths. Only those who wish to strip the offices of power of their power are legitimate, in any degraded "limited suffrage only" pseudo-democracy.

The flaw in the concept of "representative" democracy is the thinking that "representation" is possible.

Nobody represents my vote. I vote "not guilty" and "do not punish the accused in 99% of cases where the accused are currently punished." I would only vote "guilty" in cases of actual intentional, informed, purposeful harm (cases with a valid "corpus delicti").

The prior function has only briefly existed in western civilization, but it presided over the explosions of wealth and prosperity known as "the industrial revolution"(1770-present) AND "the information revolution"(1970-present).

The dislike that (most) sufficiently-radical-to-be-meaningful libertarians have for pseudo-democracy ought not be conflated with a dislike of actual democracy. Democracy has saved millions of lives, even in increasingly-degraded form. If you want the benefits of democracy, it's best to focus on bringing proper jury trials to an area prior to bringing elections to an area.

The problem that most humans have with separating scalars into separate, differentiated-for-utility, and appropriate(well-mapping) domains is likely to eliminate all human freedom on Earth. It would be a shame if "libertarians" continue their current trend of contributing to this problem. #freedom #freedomofspeech #abolition #libertarianism #democracy