The Varyag is currently writing an article addressing the Congenial Idiot on the subject of democracy as well, since he's written two long-winded articles explaining that he has no idea what the word even means. I'll let you know when it's finished, you might enjoy it. Here's an excerpt:
Plato was correct that democracy can lead directly to tyranny. The highest form of democracy is dictatorship. No, I didn't make that up, Karl Marx made that up, and the mental gymnastics are disturbingly easy to follow. “Dictator” is the Latin word for “speaker,” and it is the exact title that Gaius Julius Caesar held; he was “speaker for the Roman people” in a senate that hadn’t cared about public will for quite some time. This is why so many dictatorships call themselves “democratic”; when the “people’s speaker” has absolute power, then “the people are empowered.” Which people, however, are never specified. I’m not the only one to point this out, by the way. Anyone who lives in Canada knows that when Justin Trudeau Castro says “our democracy,” he literally means his democracy, because he can’t have public will interfering with the collective will of his cronies in the political class. By the way, this is why the phrase "people's republic" is understood, even in the US, to mean "police state," and it is sometimes applied derisively to certain American jurisdictions, e.g. the "People's Republic of Maryland." Generally speaking, the more collectivist the name, the more authoritarian the system, such as the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" or the "National Socialist German Workers' Party."