Representative "democracy" means that you can't say that the people wanted a specific policy, only that they considered some person (and their ELECTION platform

Representative "democracy" means that you can't say that the people wanted a specific policy, only that they considered some person (and their ELECTION platform, which has just about nothing to do with how they'd actually behave in office) the least awful of the given options. As you said yourself, it was created in secret as a reactionary policy (because those always work out great!), so there was no possible oversight or popular approval.