there seems to be a fair number of LessWrongians who are revolted by democracy, and I've never been sure why.

But why Because I think "democratic" is an applause light. Indeed the ur example of an applause light. People go as far as to often think of it as having intrinsic value! Indeed I think Western civilization has had an affective death spiral around democracy.

I think we systematically overestimated how good democracy is partially because of the following reasons:

1. We cherry pick what counts as democracy and especially what a failed democracy is, why do we so seldom consider the aftermath of a failed democracy (think Weimar republic )? The badness of Communism is more often talked about in the context of the mess it left in former Communist countries after collapse than in the context of the millions of lives it lost. Why not talk about democracy that way every now and then? I mean sure ideally you don't want your car to crash. But if your car does crash you do hope it has been designed to make crashes as survivable as possible.

2. Wealthy countries with well educated citizens tend to be democracies. Wealthy countries with well educated citizens also tend to have high rates of obesity. Clearly obesity is less bad than starvation and democracy is less bad than Communism, but is this really something to brag about?

3. Because it says it is and most of us grew up in it. Children will believe in God just because they are told by their parents, imagine what they will believe if told by not only their parents, and perhaps priests but teachers too!

I can understand not approving of government in general, but democracies (which I'm going to tentatively define as governments where a noticeable proportion of elections have surprising enough results to be worth betting on) seem to have less awful failure modes than a lot of other sorts of governments.

Democracy is viewed as the only legitimate kind of government by Western thinkers. This stifles possible innovation in government. Democracy is also by far the most popular kind of government (who would have thought that popular government would be a popular concept?).

Also if democracy is indeed the best form of government tried so far, maybe by analysing it we can come up with something even better? Isn't this argument for democracy merely a Burkean conservative one in nature ? LW dismisses those out of hand so often, yet when it comes to democracy it seems to be seldom questioned.

Think of the famous Churchill quote:

Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

A Vizier in Ancient Egypt could have said the same thing about divine right monarchy where the king is worshipped as a living god. Do we really expect no further positive (?) change in government except in the direction of it being more "democratic"?

Would you or anyone else be interested in explaining why democracy seems like an obviously bad idea to you?

That is more or less the point of the thread. But first I'd like to learn why people seem to think it is a great idea.