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By dying I meant exactly this. Dying in the sense of becoming useless for democratic nations.

Also why would you tie together democracy and bureaucracies in your complaint? They’re not even remotely relevant to each other.

Representative democracy.

In a hypothetical direct democracy you have the voting population, the bureaucracy and the tasks at hand. The voters make decisions, the bureaucracy does the work but has no deciding power, and in general things are not so bad. Supposedly. If the bureaucracy doesn't obey, then the solutions are different, one of them is not having a bureaucracy - filling all government worker roles by perpetual rotation of citizens, pseudo-randomly chosen from among consenting citizens (maybe with some limitations like, eh, having competencies for those roles).

In a representative democracy you have another group, representatives. Who are supposed to just integrate what their voters would do, but in fact merge with the bureaucracy to form an unholy tumor. That would happen very slowly in the olden days, and the efficiency gain from having professional bureaucracy was notable, but in the modernity with the Internet and modern computing means that'll happen even in a new representative democracy in a few years or months.

That's because the government can manipulate voters with modern tech to get the results it needs, and by it I mean the elite, and by the elite I mean people near the point in society where the bureaucracy, the representatives and the money meet.

So, now I'm going to describe a pipe dream.

If the government (meaning the representatives and the bureaucrats) has very high rotation rate, and every citizen has roughly an equal (ideally) chance of working in every role in it, then that won't happen. Voted in representatives are just not fit for this task because of arithmetic of a vote (ranked choice with positive and negative votes included, attention limitations and ballot size even if it's a webpage of 1001 variants are a thing). Sortitioned representatives are ideally fit, but in practice sortition is hard to do right, one can fake it.

But representatives are not strictly speaking necessary for voting on already suggested laws, this doesn't require qualifications, the only reason they were needed for that was because of connectivity in the old times. For discussions one can elect representatives to councils, which would then only vote on suggesting a law to be decided by all voters, for example. A council dealing with military shouldn't deal with tech, and so on, elected in parallel. Each council member can be recalled by a vote of their constituency, started by, say, collecting enough signatures for that. Since councils only have one level, Stalin's approach to coming to power in the USSR won't work through this.

Now bureaucrats and any qualified work in the government. These, yes, require qualifications, but far less than people loving authority tend to pretend. So other parallel councils (a council for such HR management for military permanent personnel wouldn't be the same as the council for suggesting laws about military) can be elected to then fill technical roles (secretaries, IT support and janitors, but also, ahem, military and such) with consenting qualified citizens. With very firm requirements for rotation, ideally calculated so that almost every citizen would have experience in a few areas of government work and politics when they turn 40.

And maybe similar separate councils for managing finances.

Ideally also the role of councils in lawmaking would be limited to optimization, so to suggest a law one wouldn't need a successful council vote, N citizens supporting it in some incubator would be enough. One could have a fallback for councils of other types the same way, enough supporters for action -> common vote.

Why I'm calling this direct democracy - well, because this doesn't give any exclusive power to representatives. This makes a lot of entities with very little power, using a significant portion of the population participating actively, thus preventing a capture of the government by interested groups.

The arithmetic of voted in representatives is still not good, but at least there's too many of them and for too many different kinds of work and with mandated rotation, so political technologies become less useful. I would also fill half the places in every council via ranked choice vote (with "plus" and "minus" votes like in social media) and half via sortition by pseudo-random selection based on combination of personal identity numbers of all consenting citizens in a constituency.

OK, too long a post. I hope it explains that I meant entrenched elites where none are intended by design.