What you’re describing is how administrative bureaucracies used to work in the U.S. before the 1920s and in Europe before the E.U. That’s consistent with democr

What you’re describing is how administrative bureaucracies used to work in the U.S. before the 1920s and in Europe before the E.U. That’s consistent with democracy. The anti-democratic part is when the elected officials began delegating more and more power to those bureaucracies and those bureaucracies became more independent and insulated from elections. That when the backslide happened. In the U.S. that happened because of legislation and new legal doctrines in the 1930s. In Europe it happened because of increasing delegation of power to the centralized E.U. bureaucracy.