> there's no central King whose greed for wealth can be satisfied once.

King and court and lords are the same amount of greedy bastards. The issue with kings is on another plain, what to do with power transfer to a new king. Democracy try to solve exactly this problem. What to do with individuals bending laws to be new kings is another issue to solve.

> Perhaps the problem lies in the Anglo-American "Democracy" as a system of rule itself

Your description of the problems is accurate and the solution hinges on the “Anglo-American” descriptor. Western style democracies don’t work with you get non westerners (or those that don’t see themselves as European) involved. Kevin MacDonald’s books describe how our western cultural systems are uniquely vulnerable to coordinated (ethnic) groups. He’s an actually banned author, but I’d recommend his books if you’re interested in an accurate breakdown of the problem (and please don’t decry them without reading them).

So, the problem isn’t necessarily democracy, it’s that certain groups make democracy impossible. Just like dev teams - with high trust members, you can get some impressive stuff done. But add in a few deliberate bad actors and it all falls apart.

You summarized the "democracy the god that failed" book.

The issue is we look upon the government for solutions. In reality, the answer always lies in us.

What people don't get about 'Anglo-American' democracy is that the various political governmental bodies ARE NOT the governing mechanism of society

If you're not president of some local board or organization, then YOU are the problem. America is a nation of presidents. Until we each do that, the country will always be missing something. Outside observers clearly noted this early on in this country's history. People completely misplace their trust today depending on the government.

This is why transplanting American legal systems to foreign cultures doesn't work. The work to be done is not governmental but rather interior to each individual in society

A true democracy would be people voting on laws directly and having the _option_ to appoint an assistant to vote for them.

That's right - politicians would not be "leaders" but assistants who could be removed or replaced at any time.

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A political party and a person's political opinion are both points in a high-dimensional vector space. The greatest issue with representative democracy is that voting is the act of describing one point (your political opinion) by picking another point from a small predefined set (political parties) which is acceptably close to yours.

That's nuts and it should be obviously nuts to anyone who understands a tiny bit of vector math. Thank god they don't teach it until university or we'd have riots every day until it was fixed.

Not even in its founding. Federalist #10 spells out exactly the fears that Madison had about democracy. You give people full political power and they'll use it to redistribute wealth/land. So you need to give people somewhere to funnel their energies without rocking the boat too hard. Originally we weren't supposed to vote for Senators and the presidency was mostly conceived as a ceremonial role and the Electoral College was there just in case the establishment was ever too threatened by "democracy"

Yes, nowhere has a 'democracy', this is a sales or branding term.

What we have is 'representative democracy' where people choose someone to represent them.

So, hundreds, thousands or even millions choose one person to represent them for 4-5 years. That person decides those people's best interests on what to do for the thousands of decisions that come up.

The representative however does not need to do any of the things they said they would. They can not be held accountable for saying one thing but doing the other (ie lying), except at the end of their term, when they can be voted out. (Giving another the chance to do the same.) They only have to catch the people's aspirations, not deliver on them.

And even on those 'decisions' that the representative does get a chance to opine and vote on, the representative is hamstrung - bills contain so much that no one would agree with. Even if there were well-meaning representatives, they are unable to do anything with bills written by lobbyists in the pay of the companies that the bill is meant to 'restrain' - representatives cannot agree only with the good and leave the bad.