This chapter advances a counter-history of democracy that rejects the civilizational paradigm dominating mainstream historiography. It argues that “civilization,” as conventionally defined, is inherently linked to hierarchy, exploitation, and rule over the many, and therefore obscures the far longer history of egalitarian, community-based self-rule. Drawing on cases from African hunter-gatherers to indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, and Asia, the chapter traces a genealogy of democracy that predates states, cities, and writing by hundreds of thousands of years. It contrasts direct, participatory, and consensus-based forms of governance rooted in small-scale communities—what Native American critics of Western civilization call the antidote to Wétiko—with the coercive structures of statehood and representative democracy. Using historical, anthropological, and archaeological evidence, the chapter demonstrates that democracy’s survival has depended on resisting, evading, or retreating from state power, and that tribal organization provides the necessary communal basis for sustaining egalitarian politics. By reframing democracy as a global, prehistoric, and ongoing tradition, rather than a European invention, it challenges Eurocentric narratives and calls for a paradigm shift in the study of democratic history.