The highest utility of liberal democracy is not to maximise efficiency vs an imaginary optimum (see Hayek for why it's imaginary).

It's to lower the expected costs of power transfer from "catastrophic" to "routine".

Ballots, not bullets.

I consider myself to be strongly pro-democracy, but as a thought experiment look at TV shows like "X Factor" (or "American Idol" if you're in the US) to see the results of democracy in action. These shows should be producing the finest musicians the world has ever seen, right? After all, the masses know best.

There are some who would argue that X Factor does, in fact, produce the best because best means nothing but most popular. Otherwise, you have to bring in subjective measures of taste which are open to being condemned as elitist.

(Personally, I'm happy to be an elitist, provided it's an open elite that anyone can join)

Is this any more or less valid for government? What does it mean to be a successful government? Ultimately I contend that if the majority of your populous is happy, you're a successful government. So is this any more or less valid than X-Factor being a popularity contest? I popular government is one that keeps the populous happy. So isn't democracy equally a popularity contest?

Or perhaps that was your point and I misinterpret your words.

How many countries is the majority truly happy? Do you think they are in America? How many riots/protests have there been lately?

We're so polarized that families are starting to hate each other based on their political views.

I think a successful government is one that ensures the highest level of education for the largest amount of people, spends $0 on international affairs until ALL domestic affairs (like poverty, healthcare, etc) are covered or at least miniscule as to affect less than 2% - unless a 'true' war is initiated i.e. we're physically attacked by a nation (not terrorists that are from a specific nation), and regime change 'just because' is not even a consideration.

I think a successful government would also give 0 kickbacks, deductions, and rewards to any specific business or industry (except perhaps food/farming as needed for weather/crop performance considerations as we all need to eat). Money and corporations should have 0 access to politicians.

The fact is if you look at a graph of politics over the past 100 years, and how often the people get policies enacted that are 'popular' vs how often the rich do it's basically a flatline for us, and a progressive diagonal for them.

Popularity has nothing to do w/ politics --until we get more 'popular' non-career politicians into D.C. BrandNewCongress is an interesting organization trying to do just that for both Republicans and Democrats. It's like if X-factor judges could be bought and some nazily person who can't sing at all wins instead of the popular vote. The show would be cancelled in a heartbeat. But that's how America is ran.

We let people choose the government, but we don't let them make important decisions (except in rare cases when the government is foolish enough to hold a referendum).

The whole point of representative democracy is to put a firewall between the "the masses" and decision-making, while allowing them some influence.

Historically, party and other elites have also largely controlled who was in a position to become a representative in the first place, although that stops working when the elites become completely out-of-touch with the electorate (hence Trump).

Identifying the smartest people is only one job of the election process - another one is dividing up limited resources. Usually, elitism focuses on the fact that scientists can elect more scientific politicians than normal people, ignoring the possibility that (bear with me), scientists might want to spend all the road money building roads to their labs.