Wrong but With Awesome Sauce

So Matthew Ygelsais reads something about how if citizens get to choose how their tax dollars are spent there is less on defense and more social programs. He concludes:

This is a reminder that one of my least-favorite sayings about politics is the idea that democracy is the worst form of government except for the alternatives. Not that I favor dictatorship, but this often seems to me to reflect a failure of imagination. There are lots of non-authoritarian modes of governance, including selecting people by lottery (like we do for juries), plebiscites, direct citizen input (as in this tax choice concept), along with different balances between elected officials, appointees, and civil servants. It’s important to actually think about the flaws in our current approach and whether better ideas exist.

Did you know that the Athenians used lottery to fill some of the offices of their democratic system of government? Did you know that California uses plebisites? Did you know that "direct citizen input" is nearly the dictionary definition of democracy? Are you, in other words, aware that with the exception of the meaningless stuff about balancing between different agents in a democratic form of governance, you are arguing against democracy by pointing out all the different ways democracies have and continue to organize? It's almost like he paid no attention in any of classes because he was busy being interesting.