The roots of the critique
Plato's hostility to democracy is the most powerful critique of popular rule ever written, and the platform reads it as rooted in hard experience. Plato came of age as democratic Athens lost the Peloponnesian War through the volatility and overreach of its assembly; and in 399 BCE that same democracy tried and executed his teacher Socrates, the wisest and best man Plato knew, on a charge of impiety. The platform reads Plato's critique as the considered response of a brilliant mind to the question: what kind of regime kills its wisest citizen?
The argument
The platform reads Plato's case against democracy as resting on two arguments. The first is competence: ruling is a skill, like navigation or medicine, and to give power to the untrained many is as foolish as letting the passengers steer the ship or the patients prescribe the medicine. The second, developed in Republic VIII, is dynamic: democracy prizes freedom above all and pushes it to excess, until every restraint of law, authority and reason is felt as oppression — and the resulting disorder breeds a longing for a strong man to restore order, so that democracy, by its own logic, tends to produce the tyranny it most fears. The platform reads the Gorgias as adding a third: that democratic politics rewards the flatterer over the truth-teller, the demagogue over the statesman.
What it gets right
The platform reads Plato's critique as containing uncomfortable truths that no defender of democracy should dismiss. Democracies are prone to volatility, to demagoguery, to the preference for pleasant lies over hard truths, to the overreach of an unrestrained majority — the Athenian record bears Plato out. The slide from unlimited freedom toward disorder and then toward a strongman is a real and recurring pattern, visible in the fall of more than one democracy. The platform reads Plato as the permanent diagnostician of democracy's characteristic diseases.
What it gets wrong
The platform reads the answer to Plato as the one the democratic tradition eventually found. Plato's alternative — rule by those who know the good — founders on the fact that no one possesses the certain knowledge he requires, and that the cure he proposes (absolute power to the supposedly wise) is more dangerous than the disease. The democratic answer is not that the many are wise but that no one is wise enough to be trusted with unchecked power — so that the dispersal of power, the rule of law, and the accountability of rulers are safer than the rule of any claimed expert. The platform reads the long argument between Plato and democracy as still live, sharpened in democracy versus oligarchy: his critique is the strongest case against democracy, and answering it is part of what makes a thoughtful defence of democracy possible.