The argument that democracy doesn't work because Nazis is a really bad one. The only thing that argument shows is that you have a embarrassingly superficial knowledge of German history.
Democracy doesn't work because it's obvious that it doesn't work. It takes like five minutes of concentrated thinking to figure out its basic problems. The best thing you can say about democracy is that it's the system with least bloody failure modes out of the systems we know. Belief that it "works" is just a propaganda all of us are constantly exposed to since primary school.
I think representative democracy and then specifically representative democracy with FPTP has been shown not to work, primarily because of the principal-agent problem and also the spoilt vote effect which in turn ensures a two-party system (i.e. Duverger's law).
Direct democracy with smaller electoral districts and a saner voting system could be more efficient, or at least have much higher response times. Of course you're still stuck with the self-fulfilling bottleneck that voters will seldom pick anything outside their cultural zeitgeist, but then it keeps the electoral system well contained and lets people focus more easily on actual activism.
The best thing you can't say about Winston "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes" Churchill is that he wasn't Hitler or Stalin or the more freedom-loving but less talented people. I think his cute quote about democracy is similar, it sounds insightful until you compare it with anything more serious.
Democracy relates to various implementations of it like "blogging" does to "Wordpress version X.Y", and to various modes of control like an email from a friend does to spam containing a virus. There is a grey area, too, plenty of emails from real friends with viruses attached by intermediate servers.
I'd say the best thing you can say about democracy is that it scares power shitless, even when it's hardly effective and comes from the guts of people more than adult and focused thought and organizing. Once we ever being implemented without anyone who doesn't want it to work being involved, we can talk benchmarks. As it is, it's like writing a program in C, then letting a bunch of cats walk over the keyboard, then compiling, and saying C sucks.
That depends on what you consider "working". I would certainly consider most modern democracies to work, some slightly better than others. Certainly all modern democracies are stable and not threatened with catastrophic failure.
The democracy in the Weimar Republic didn't work by any reasonable definition because it was horribly designed. If the Nazis hadn't happened, someone else would've almost cetainly destroyed it sooner rather than later.
> Certainly all modern democracies are stable and not threatened with catastrophic failure.
What would you call climate change, or coming energy crisis, or degenerating trust of public in authority leading to things like anti-vaccination movements? I consider them existential threats to technological civilization. Those problems are issues of coordination, and they play right into failure modes of modern democracies. In this sense I consider them not "working".
I agree that there are times when it fails, although I am not so sure we would agree on when exactly that happens. But it's a bit of a stretch to say that anything not perfect does not work -- particularly since there isn't that much agreement about how it should work.
