the problem with democracy is the people are morons, so we’ve gotta figure out how to protect the idiot plebs from themselves

That is a problem. Representative democracy in our federal republic (the US) aims to mitigate the “tyranny of the dull mob”.

What we need (in the US) is to tweak term limits, introduce ranked voting, and have more direct-vote referendums to help check the power imbalance of plutocrats.

We don’t need to throw out the Socratic Method.