You summoned me with your comment above so I feel compelled to respond to this interesting comment.

I agree that there are many interesting developments in political philosophy on the nature of democracy. The issue is that such academic debates have almost no impact on any current political system that describes itself as a "democracy" and the poor citizens that live under it.

One of the best ideas I got from reading Marx (which also shows that people who read Moldbug tend to read widely, hey) is that political ideals aren't real. They don't matter. All that matters is the living breathing primates that inhabit our political systems, the stuff those primates have, and whether the primates are happy. Bad political systems are bad because they cause cruelty to animals.

"Freedom" is simply a matter of the monkeys being able to do what they want and not feeling like they are being bossed around by bigger monkeys. "Equality" is a matter of ensuring that the low status monkeys don't feel too low status.

As for "democracy" - well, it turns out that monkeys are generally happier living in industrial economies (with their abundant iPads, cappuccinos, etc), but that such economies require huge centralised bureaucracies to run effectively. The theatre of frequent elections is a convenient way to make every monkey feel like an alpha monkey whose opinion is important and not simply a well-pampered slave.

Both the first year college students with their "laughably simplistic definition of democracy" and "Rawls, Dworkin, Gutmann, Thompson, Bohman, Dryzek, Young, Mansbridge, etc. -- and of course Habermas" with their highly nuanced definition of democracy are in the same category as people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists. They have a fun intellectual pastime, and all power to them. But the latest mind-expanding discoveries in category theory have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code. (The best they can hope for is that some enlightened and energetic project manager decides to let them rewrite part of the system in Rails.) Likewise, the latest advances in democratic theory have no impact on the people staffing the enormous bureaucracies which run advanced economies. At least the Haskell guys can write Tetris apps in 4 lines of code to show off. It'd be cool if Rawls would gather 100,000 followers to some private island to test-drive his own political system, but it's unlikely to happen. (On a side note, did you hear that seasteaders are evil fascist brogrammers and that charter cities are neoliberal colonialism?)

I'd actually be glad to hear you correct me and tell me that no, actually most Western democracies hand out books by the authors you cited to civil service employees, who hold regular workplace seminars on how to best implement such ideas and bring real democracy (tm) to the world.

EDIT: I realise that I never responding to the grandparent question about freedom and democracy. Well, there are many forms of "freedom" and democracy is certainly compatible with some of them. But I note that democratic states, lacking strong leaders with ability to make more than token cuts to government spending, tend to show a monotonic increase in the number of government departments that decide to regulate ever more and more aspects of life. The thing with regulation is that every individual item of regulation sounds sensible (how can we let people get away with poorly fitted child car seats? the humanity!) but over time people forget that a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone and b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so.

An even bigger issue is the fact that if you are a paycheck employee (especially if you have a mortgage, debt and a family) you are in many ways a comfortably-off serf. An ever-growing government takes an ever-growing share of your salary, and since taxpayers are close to being an electoral minority in many countries (did you snark at Mitt Romney's 48% comments?) you are likely to spend ever more of your limited time on Earth working hard to fund TSA agents, drone strikes and the healthcare of aging pensioners. An anglo-saxon freeman had more personal autonomy. At least if you're reading this site you can make plans to build a bootstrapped passive income and move to Thailand.