Oh, and as far as misalignment of government and citizens' desires in democracies...
You may want to read "Seeing Like a State" by James Scott, or https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ for an illustrative review if you don't want to read the whole book. Some of the examples in the book are from totalitarian regimes, but Brazil is a democracy and still ended up with some of the same failure modes, and the blog post gives a hypothetical but oft-repeated in practice example of a less-local (city-wide or larger) government trampling all over people from a particular part of the city, all with the best of intentions, because it thinks (possibly correctly!) that it can't accomplish those intentions without making its job easier by destroying the local communities.
Democratic government does help avoid excesses like mass deaths due to obtuse state action, of course, and this is a pretty darned good endorsement given the history of the 20th century. But it certainly doesn't eliminate obtuse state action.
You may want to read "Seeing Like a State" by James Scott, or https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ for an illustrative review if you don't want to read the whole book. Some of the examples in the book are from totalitarian regimes, but Brazil is a democracy and still ended up with some of the same failure modes, and the blog post gives a hypothetical but oft-repeated in practice example of a less-local (city-wide or larger) government trampling all over people from a particular part of the city, all with the best of intentions, because it thinks (possibly correctly!) that it can't accomplish those intentions without making its job easier by destroying the local communities.
Democratic government does help avoid excesses like mass deaths due to obtuse state action, of course, and this is a pretty darned good endorsement given the history of the 20th century. But it certainly doesn't eliminate obtuse state action.