Comments Elsewhere

That works if you think representative democracy and populism is particularly good. I don’t. There are numerous examples for why it’s not, such as Jim Crow laws in our own country, Apartheid, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and a sad, long list that goes on and on.

I have plenty of complaints against what I’ve described as “elective oligarchy” and what you describe as “representative democracy” here, but I don’t think that these are very good examples to cite. Just to take a couple of your examples, South African Apartheid and American Jim Crow, were sustained by systematic and near-universal disenfranchisement of the Black population (which in South Africa and in some parts of the South meant that the numerical majority of the population weren’t able to vote). They are no more examples of “representative democracy” than the “election” of the Holy Roman Emperor by the Prince-Electors or of the Pope by the College of Cardinals. And in fact both systems were promptly, permanently, and thoroughly destroyed by the simple expedient of enfranchising Black people to vote.

There are lots of crimes and lots of failures to lay at the doorstep of elective oligarchy, but this really isn’t one of them. The cases you mention are cases where representative elections, when they happened, destroyed or blocked the power of would-be tyrants, and in which it was only through the ruthless use of disenfranchisement, political repression, and overt terror that pseudo-representative power was consolidated.