I think democracy is perhaps a fundamentally unstable system. It requires constant corrective force, and a lot of it, from a lot of people. When the members of that democracy start to get a little too comfortable it fails.

Humans are designed to operate in smallish clans with benevolent dictators whose right to rule is based on social currency with people they personally know. Anything else is a house of cards on unstable foundation.

I'm not sure how you fix that, but democracy so far has maybe been the least bad patch.

> ... the least bad patch.

That was Churchill's view, as he said during a speech in the House of Commons in 1947:

"Many forms of Gov­ern­ment have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pre­tends that democ­ra­cy is per­fect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democ­ra­cy is the worst form of Gov­ern­ment except for all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time to time . . ."

The American founders predicted all these problems, which is why they formed a representative democracy. However over the years we have chipped away at that aspect and ended up with an election systems that encourage populism.