However, for the Radical Progressive, this just isn’t fast enough. It is faster to have a pseudo democracy, with the culture being rapidly shunted along via terrible and corrupt leaders, hence the Supreme Court now essentially rules America and can overrule pretty much anything. Democratic processes on the ground can be held up, tangled in delayed referendums, recalls, and such. This is why the Constitution is such a trump card for the Left. The Constitution can ALWAYS be used to override the will of the people if it isn’t extreme enough at any given point in time. Conservatives get this ass-backwards. They think the Constitution prevents a Left wing tyranny via majority, but really it imposes Left wing tyranny against the majority in many cases.

Any Liberal document can be used to justify any Liberal cause. It does not need to be specifically mentioned.

The big problem with defining Cathedral as democracy is this: you say “a state is a democracy if it has a strong electoral principle and a relatively large ruling class”. Relative to population, the Cathedral constitutes a tiny ruling class. In the Athenian democracy citizens were able to have their voices heard and have some impact in their decisions. Citizens in Western countries get to vote for a tiny segment of their leaders, and only a few of these actually have any power in the overall structure. If we wanted to look at the class which actually does any ruling, we’re taking a ratio of people at ABC agencies + various law-writing lobbies + elite universities + elite press and comparing it to gen pop. It’s imperfect because in Athens there was more overlap with a citizen having prominence and political power, but we have a much smaller class actually ruling.

Unlike demotists, NRx doesn’t consider that an issue in itself. The problem is that it justifies itself based on the myth of democracy and preaches this gospel to the whole world at gunpoint. You distinguish pretty starkly between democrats and populists, but the history you outlined shows that every step in the direction of democracy had the populist justification. Basic Moldbug: Leftism is the quest to seize power, nothing more. The issue with democracy is, as you described, that the true power networks are not formalized (and can never be) and this disincentivizes sound government. This is also why a populist challenge to a nominally democratic ruling class fails to provide sound government in the long run even if it manages to replace the old informal networks with its own informal networks. Populists being a threat to democracy just means they’re a threat to the last generation’s populists. The tyrants seem to be effective insofar as they rise on a populist basis but then quickly establish themselves as dictatorial sovereigns and not democrats.

That a popular movement concept is being discussed within nRX is a pretty dire reflection on it’s nose dive into identitarianism. People at large should also have zero role in government, they have no place there. This piece implies that a “true” democracy with a different name is acceptable -it isn’t.