Democracy seems appealing if you're insecure and/or naive enough to think that the next guy probably knows better and you're willing to rely on that as a rule.
The real world is many orders of magnitude more complex and idiosyncratic than most political thought expresses.
Admittedly, I didn't read TFA, but the headline is a glaringly obvious conclusion that nytimes is undoubtedly parading as some radical, innovative revelation.
In my (very limited) experience, the fewer logical and polariZed jumps a person is willing to make, the more rational that person is, or at least that thought they're pursuing at that time. People jumping down a spectrum of subjectivity are not engaged to a paradigm of any reason or rational or logical thought, it's all emotional and egotistical. One claim never begets another, only evidence.