Exactly. Democracy is a flawed concept.

Universal suffrage means that politicians have to appeal to the masses. The easiest way to do that is by promising more things at a lower cost. People are lazy by nature. (Or, more politely, "cost-efficient" with their time and energy.) If you tell them that voting for you will give them benefits at no costs or at minimal costs, they'll be more likely to vote for you. This always advantages the Left, who constantly promise more support at other people's expense, rather than benefitting the Right, who advocate for self-reliance and personal responsibility. Thus, democracy inevitably leads to the Overton Window constantly shifting to the Left.

The only ways to avoid this would be to not implement universal suffrage, like the US' founders initially intended. To only allow a specific subset of people to be allowed to choose who is in power, with a method to ensure that these people would not be corrupt or goaded by promises of gifts bought at the citizenry's expense.

Barring that, considering that it's essentially an impossible standard, the most reliable methods of governance are probably dictatorships, or monarchies (essentially the same thing, just a different justification for their rule) by benevolent rulers or, at least, by people heavily incentivized to promote the success of the nation under their rule.

Democracy is a relatively modern concept, a social experiment promoted only in the last few hundreds of years, and one that has been shown to inevitably lead to a collapse. Whether that collapse can be empirically determined to take longer to be reached than it would have under a monarchy is still up for debate, imo, but it might be worth looking into, as long as outside factors like the advent of industrialization and globalization through instant universal communication are taken into account.