Any system can be abused by asshole smarts, I guess. It is probably foolish to hope for a system where any abuse can be eridicated. I am sceptical about mechanical means of ensuring smooth "perpetual motion" of the society. Anything can be possible with good will of people, within almost any system, and anything can be doomed without it. The sad thing of today is that good will of people is ridiculed to the ground. Am I naive to imply that good will is the saviour? Well, if you can imagine a real crisis for humanity, with real survival pressure on individuals, the best chance for you to survive is probably to live within a moral (that is, good willed) community. I planned to write a diary long ago along the line "That's how Darwinian survival of the moral works", but sorry for laziness...

Getting back to democracy, perhaps we should be less Platonic with our ideals, and settle for some practical democracy and justice. A small pool of parasite smarts is not fatal to a healthy system - while the society  looks to greed with contempt rather than with praise, the standard of abuse can be kept low. We can only regret that the world goes the wrong direction for now.

There is one thing wrong with "spreading" democracy wherever we can - in fresh democrasies people discover new abuses very fast; often it is just adoptation of older corrupt patterns. Then the abuse methods and standards spread around even faster, to original democratic societies as well. For instance, the US corporate and political hacks may have gotten recent inspiration from Russia or other ex-Soviet countries. Maybe nothing new is in this world, maybe it's all "inside everyone of us". But it is very possible that  abuse standards went up objectively greatly everywhere within the last decade, that the excuse "it's all normal" is merely a conveninet fallacy.