Democracy is what the people want. Majoritarianism is blindly doing what most people want. Populism involves majoritarianism, and both imply the failure of democracy. (This happens fast in a system of elections with no checks and balances.)
Is democracy what most people want or just the people?
People, broadly. (And unfortunately, ambiguously.)
It is not what most people want, that’s majoritarianism, a known failure mode for democratic systems. The majority voting to execute the 10% whose views they don’t believe in is fine, electorally, but bankrupt, democratically.
No, it’s not.
Um, what? "The people" is not a single entity, and does not "want" things. Individual people want things. So if democracy is "what the people want", then democracy does not exist.
Congratulations, you’ve found the fatal flaw in millennia of thinking on the topic.
What “the people” want is unknowable. That is the point and paradox. Democracy is a system for balancing individual wants against individual needs, enabling each majority while protecting every minority. It’s a system of trade-offs which eludes poetic summation. It dies when we get caught up in word play over pragmatic concerns, or when someone claims to speak singularly for what “the people” want.
In other words, as I said, democracy does not exist--since no actual system has ever actually done these things.
It exists as much as Newtonian gravity. It’s an ideal because we’re defining it in its idealised form.
Political systems aspire to sets of ideals. Some emphasise stability; their leaders are Machiavellian. Some aspire to democratic ideals. Democracy per se is a simplification, as all political systems must be to fit into a textbook, but that doesn’t make it less real. Just difficult to summarise.
It’s a deep debate beyond a quip or HN comment. I wasn’t trying to define democracy, just delineate it from majoritarianism, with which it’s unfortunately commonly confused.
They claim to, but I have yet to see one that actually does, except for the Machiavellian case you mention, where the leaders are quite open about the fact that they're looking out for their own interests and let the chips fall where they may as far as the impact on anyone else. If you can call that an ideal.
Even if I take your idealized form as you state it and put aside my previous objections, when I ask myself what kind of system in human history has actually come closest to doing what you describe, what I get is an ultra-libertarian free market system with a government that is as weak as possible--at any rate, in which any government that exists does not have a monopoly of force and cannot expect to enforce its edicts against people that disagree with them. Historical examples include Saga period Iceland and some of the American colonies in the late 1600s and early to mid 1700s, before the British decided to tighten up on the colonies after the French and Indian War.
In other words, if your ideal really is "democracy" as you describe it, historical experience shows that governments take you away from that ideal, not towards it.