Democracy has accountability by virtue of everyone having a vote. It’s a small power that everyone can use to hold their leaders to account. But it still allows people to hold arbitrary power over each other. If you can convince enough people, you can apply your morals and beliefs on others. For instance, lots of discrimination is a function of democracy and codifying oppression of certain people.
We sit here furiously debating who can use a bathroom, who gets preferential treatment, who you have to interact with and a million other things. “Both sides” are bent on forcing people to behave a certain way and they use the power of the vote everyone has to accumulate power and make things “how they ought to be”.
I think this could be done democratically but everyone has different interests. How do we find a common, singular interest and then optimize around that?
Or maybe democracy is the “best bad system” and we just have to make do. I do believe with the hyper connected world we have today, cryptography, and resource abundance that we could transcend the modern system and discover liberation from each other to be ourselves and pursue truly enriching lives at a mass scale within local communities. And this means a different thing to different people. But just about everything in our modern system would need to be disposed of and recast.