I'm much more interested in the question of democracy's morality per se, given baseline human nature, than its "efficiency" or costs in a given historical environment (not meaning the intristic goodness of some abstract "eidos of Democracy", just whether it should be Sacred, like other "moral essentials", or not).

Unfortunately, I don't (yet) even have a remote inkling of an answer; my intuition, of course, is that ruling people without meaningful group consent is very ugly in itself, and "manufacturing consent" too directly is paperclipping, but I'm honestly trying to reflect on the matter according to my entire breadth of view.