The biggest telltale of a confused leftist (i.e. hangs around the current conservative counter-culture) is that he is still brainwashed with the modern form of phony democracy being the ideal of free society. This contrasts with Ancient Greco-Roman [1] conception of citizenship akin to nobility and bourgeois/middle-class, with a middle/working-class of freemen sitting between the former and slaves. While not purely meritocratic, ancient democracy meant having stakes in the game. [2]
In libertarian circles, there's also the concept of market-democracy, where having stakes in the game means individuals answer better questions, and makes more accurate collective decisions . The Wisdom of Crowds (pdf) book cites plenty of examples, such as the stock-market quickly identifying who was responsible for the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. Political commentary is mostly outside the scope of the book, particularly with the inconclusive last chapter [3].
Without a useful term, discussing this concept or anything related to the uninitiated is unnecessarily verbose, even though it is an intuitive, populist concept.
Edit: Bad democracy is unqualified civies irresponsibly voting on people or ballot initiatives. Switzerland is passable, since ordinary citizens have better opportunity to be directly involved with state matters, for better or for worse. The only accurate phrasing I've come up with is active vs. passive democracy, but that doesn't exclude mob/clique/committee rule, which countermands spontaneous order and independent decision aggregation. I'll share this on the blackandgold Matrix channel and hopefully get a non-leftist answer that I can share here.
Edit 2: Market democracy in quadrant format.
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- Athens, the progenitor of Democracy, had more in common with the Roman Republic or it's rival Sparta than modern societies or feudal Europe.
- Heinlein's Starship Troopers refines this concept on classical liberal principles.
- Shame that the author is a New Yorker suffering from TDS.
The former is what I've used to broach the subject, which works with casual conservatives, but not confused leftists. It puts anyone that slants left on guard, which is okay if I want to piss off a coworker or bar addict. The key here is the concept that applies both to public office and private
Republican might work in Europe where at worst it means anti-monarchy, but here in America, low on the list of things I talk to a strangers about is the drama/theater surrounding the GOP and DNC.
I would have not even made this post if parasites didn't co-opt the word 'stake' for the incoherent "stakeholder capitalism", which is almost the reverse of the important concept I'm trying to condense to one or two words. I'm just falling back on meritocracy and social darwinism, even if those fail at subtlety changing a person's train-of-thought that majority-rule is good and natural. Democracy is a synthetic radioisotope.