Your blog post parallels ideas that I've been musing about myself. An artist I know turned my thoughts on democracy into a comic, the second one of the set here. And my pet hard-SF setting assumes much of what you describe at the end of your post - remote-controlled infantry allowing the powers-that-be to ignore popular disapproval (including having put down the 'Blue Revolution' across most of the planet), leading to an oligarchy in fact if not in name.