Note how people often evoke the specifically benevolent dictator when comparing forms of governance, stacking the deck from the start; democracy and other forms of governance don’t get such a privilege, as they are supposed to be evaluated on its empirical merits.
So you don’t have to worry about an evil and selfish dictator by definition. How nice!
> Democracy only works when you have an educated population, otherwise you get what's happening in the US.
First of all, democracy working cannot be judged on whether people make “educated” decisions: it works if people have the power to choose. Similarily freedom does not work if only people do good things; it works if they have the power to be free.
I cannot walk into a grown person’s home and judge whether they should be free to make choices based on the choices they make unless I am so arrogant as to consider myself an adult and them a child (relatively speaking). Yet this “democracy only works” line of thinking reeks of this attitude.
But this is an old-as-the-hills false goal, popular among the educated for painfully obvious reasons; the relatively educated can use their elite-adjacent power to systematically de facto disenfranchise regular people by depriving them of whatever their goalpost for “educated” is, over the span of decades. That then becomes a self-reinforcing and (in their eyes) virtuous cycle; more and more disenfranchisement leads to a more and more apolitical and “stupid” people, which in turn “proves” the point! And in the end the educated and the elites get what they want: more power for themselves, less interference from the general populace.
Politics is almost always about self- and group-interest. This is not an exception; the “educated” will wax poetic about the virtues of an “informed public”, but most of them just want more power for themselves.