"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Winston Churchill
"Democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. They also are prone to some serious flaws in reasoning, to parochialism, haste, sloppiness, selfishness, narrowness of the spirit.
Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obtuseness and a technically trained docility that threaten the very life of democracy itself, and that certainly impede the creation of a decent world culture." Martha Nussbaum
Interesting OP and I agree with its basic assumptions, call our system either but it is only the people and the powers that make it good or bad, make it work for some or all. The republicans have always (?) been the party of the elite and powerful, the democrats starting with FDR, the party of inclusion and common economic sense. That break in values has caused the cultural and social wars since. Money and power spoil the stew, the Bible got that one right. I often wonder where right wingers get their education and if you read enough you realize there is (dark) money behind their fantasies as the bold above points out. See 'Invisible Hands' for a history of that training, and see 'White Trash' for the elitist republican brand of nation.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...nvisible-hands
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...33-white-trash
"
Great inequality is the scourge of modern societies. We provide the evidence on each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage births, and child well-being. For all eleven of these health and social problems, outcomes are very substantially worse in more unequal societies." Richard Wilkinson/Kate Pickett
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence
Another thought:
"Whether and how the marriage of polyarchal democracy to market-capitalism can be made more favorable to the further democratization of polyarchy is a profoundly difficult question for which there are no easy answers, and certainly no brief ones. The relation between a country's democratic political system and its nondemocratic economic system has presented a formidable and persistent challenge to democratic goals and practices throughout the twentieth century. That challenge will surely continue in the twenty-first century." Robert A. Dahl