Democracy can work for running a club, association, village, or even a town or small city. The issues are local and relevant to day-to-day living. Participation is likely to be high because the issues are manageable and understandable. Democracy for running a state or a republic is another matter. Citizens are ill-prepared to make decisions on complex issues and the financial and security consequences are so large that a significant investment of time and research are required to cast a meaningful vote. This is why we have representative democracies rather than pure democracies. It is important to note that all democracies are open to fraud, corruption and abuse. But at the local level, the stakes typically aren’t large enough to matter to the abusers. Representative democracy needs an overhaul in my opinion to restrict the ability of the professional representative to abuse their position of responsibility. The laws that prohibit corruption in business should apply to politicians as well.
Two main things lacking are a coherent concept of the good, and a notion of proper subsidiarity. In the US case, we're hashing out a synthesis of LGBT and GDP as the greatest value, and then forcing solutions developed from pop scale of millions onto communities of thousands.