Ha ha, glad you're getting a chance to vent! I think it's healthy to air our views. Even if you or I don't convince one another of everything, others may learn from our exchange.

To respond to your question, my "direct democracy" is not minority rule per se. In my system EVERYBODY gets to vote - directly. But the system is weighted so as to prevent the less intelligent or more uneducated opinions from carrying the decisions in a negative direction as opposed to ensuring a favourable long-term outcome for all.

It is self evident that if you ask a poor person with no education if they would like to pay no taxes at all, they would probably reply in the affirmative. In a country such as e.g. India, these people would greatly outnumber the educated few, and the long-term effects of their self-centred, short-term thinking would be disastrous - even for themselves. Similarly, if you have a history of anti-social behaviour, e.g. if you are a mass murderer, then you are obviously not interested in acting in the best interests of the collective and your ability to decide for everyone else should be penalised accordingly.

Intelligent people are not politicians. They don't all belong to one race, party, social class, gender etc. They are not some sort of pre-assembled cabal who have unified preferences, they are a representative sample of the population. You need not fear them as a group, simply because they are NOT a group. They are those most capable of making good decisions for the rest, so they get a chance to do that - thereby assuring the best outcome for the greatest number. Everyone still votes, but those who can help the most get the chance to do so.

Or let me put it another way: When you let everybody have an equal power vote - you end up with the current mess that most of our Western nations are in.

My take on 1930s Germany was that it was a representative democracy - a multi-party state until Hitler's famous "Night of the Long Knives", where he killed his opposition and then instantly transformed Germany into an autocratic single-party state.