Democracy by it's very nature is conflict.
Evan, you might not be a large fan of representative democracy but that it is, calling it an oligarchy is an insult to all the good oligarchies in the world, like the US government
Hell with a bit of luck the lib dems will condemn the tories to the garbage bin of history come next year, one can only hope(and vote).
There are other options, how well they scale and what they requirements they have is another question. Switzerland is small but we have a referendum on every major bill - as close as you can get to participatory democracy and some would say as close as you can get to athenian democracy as you can get in the modern world.