I'm writing this to you off-list because I think I have over posted today. But I also think that in your original post you bring up an interesting questions concerning popularity, popular mobilization, and democracy... etc. I think it is important not confuse "democracy" and its institutions with extra-legal popular mobilizations of any kind, even the ones I am likely to support.
I don't think that the problem is one of translation though, but rather one of how we can use such terms as democracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, etc. (or freedom, equality, solidarity or terror, aggression, resistance. etc.) with relative clarity. These are not scientific concepts but rather everyday political notions.
These issues you bring up are as old as the 'demos' itself. But so is the confusion of legal and extra-legal popular mobilizations and popular violence with democracy as old as the issues that you raise. It doesn't make it any less of a confusion. And unfortunately it is usually a confusion with an ideological purpose.
One only has to read the elitist and anti-democratic pseudo-Xenophon's polemic on "The political regime in ancient Athens" (and deal with the problems of translation in that text) to realize that ps-Xenophon is confronting the same issues of mob rule, popular mobilization, and democracy. In a sophistic way he tries to equate extra-legal popular mobilization with democracy in all cases and thus to collapse the distinction between various kinds of popular social movements, violent mobilizations by popular organizations, violent mobilizations by state-like organizations, and democracy into one indistinct mass. But distinctions must be made in these situations. Another good example of the collapse of the concept of democracy from the point of view of sophistry/Platonism can be found in Thrasymachus and Callicles. If you prefer not to go to the original sources Josiah Ober deals with the issues quite well in "Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule."
Similar reflections can be found in the writings of Cicero. Unfortunately, except for ancient Athens, we usually only hear the anti-democratic side of this debate. Thus Cicero also tries to reduce notions of democracy to mob rule. But one only has to read the accounts of how the Tribunate was established in the first place, through a kind of popular secession/strike from Rome by the mass of the Plebs, to realize that their is a difference between extra-legal gang violence - no matter how popular - and mass demonstrations to establish democratic or popular institutions.
The larger issues that you are grappling with are also discussed in the collection of essays "Demokratia: A conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern."
Of course nothing is absolute here. Anyone who has studied the history of vigilante committees and Lynching in the south and the west of the United States 1830-1900 knows that the Jacksonians embraced Lynchings as a form of elemental democracy and the Whigs condemned them as a form of "mob rule." (For a good history of some of this I suggest Christopher Waldrep's, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Racism changed the discourse on lynchings, but that is part of the story of Waldrep's book. )
The definitional/translational problems were similar in ancient Athens and in Jacksonian United States as they are today. But I see no reason to decline into a postmodern (or Socratic) aporia over these matters. We must use common sense and try to obtain as much clarity as we can when using such words as democracy/demokratia/demokratiya/ or else we reduce the words to ideological battering rams or meaningless hulks.
Jerry Monaco