I'm not so sure. To get a purer form of democracy to function well, you need the voters to be well informed on so many different specialized topics while also c

I'm not so sure. To get a purer form of democracy to function well, you need the voters to be well informed on so many different specialized topics while also carrying out their day jobs. With a republic, we can elect people to take on the day job of being specialized and well informed on the affairs of governing. And if we've learned any lessons from the last decade of information technology, its promise to leave us all better informed seems to have been a false promise---or at least a very mixed bag sort of promise.