First of all, thanks for this essay.

It occurs to me that only a democratic society can be authentic. Any non-democratic society exists only as an end in itself. Democracy itself gives a democratic society something to maintain and preserve beyond the society as an end in itself.

After all, doesn't authenticity reside for Heidegger in living life with the intention of being true to the 'true essence', if you will, of Being? Doesn't authenticity exist in connecting one's own being with Being--and in the process partaking in its limitlessness (if not to say infinitude)? In that sense it is living life in the context of something transcendent to oneself (without reference to any purely subjective thing--whether secular or sacral).

So Democracy is to a democracy as Being is to a human being.

just a thought