But fuck man, that guy was a lying bullshit artist ... he was a drunk. He abused his power with women. He lied to the public, to the army, to preserve his own power. And worse. He was a terrible, terrible person by all accounts.
And frankly, in that he was not exceptional. Get some papers from the 1920s, 1930s, and compare against the history books, or against science, against the truth. Again: WTF.
No, what makes democracy work, is not truth. I don't really know what does make it tick, but truth? No way. Participation? I don't have that big a smoking gun, but I doubt it. It's the option to participate that matters, not whether people actually do. In my opinion, what matters a great deal is that the government is forced to drastically change course when a large portion of the population is unhappy (which is, let's face facts, why Trump got elected, and it is why republicans are in for a world of hurt next time)
Even today, the fact of the matter is that European governments are fundamentally forced to scale back the welfare state. It is framed as a money problem, but really it is a problem of labor availability, money is only the abstraction the government uses for everything. We're blaming the abstraction. The real problem is not being seriously discussed in any European country, instead democratically elected governments are trying to sneak in cutback after cutback because "immigrants suck" or "criminals are expensive" or ... bullshit essentially.