Democracy doesn’t fail because people vote. It degrades when both voters and politicians realize they can vote for short-term financial self-interest.

Once that happens, money starts to dominate persuasion. Whoever controls the most capital eventually controls the narrative, the indexes, the incentives, and effectively the votes.

Then comes the flip. Counter-elites overthrow elites, but they don’t dismantle the system. They inherit it. And once that happens, most people are screwed, just by a different class with the same self-interest.

So yep, democracy is flawed. But it is not obvious there is a better system across all dimensions.

Want efficiency? China does infrastructure, trains, manufacturing, and cleanliness incredibly well.

Want adaptability, dissent, innovation, and course correction? Authoritarian systems are terrible at those.

And no, you don’t get to remove one minority, wave a flag, and magically become a stable nationalist utopia. Today’s western societies are multi-variable systems. Break one constraint and the pressure reappears somewhere else, usually uglier.

The real problem isn’t democracy.

It’s human incentive structures combined with scale and money.

Until someone solves that, every system converges toward the same failure modes.

Just saying, it’s a Fourth Turning. You aren’t promised a BETTER system. Just a different one.