Yes and sometimes I think “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried” is especially true in providing voters a put option. That is - we are pretty good at removing bad governments.

I don't think I would argue that democracies produce the best candidates, political class and leaders. However it provides voters the ability to remove candidates at the polls every X years, and in some cases (recalls) more frequently. While negative partisanship may make it hard to produce great leaders, it also helps limit bad ones.

So democracies don't generally end up with leaders for life who become more and more disassociated from the populace and reality.. as we see in most dictatorships and direct monarchies.

What I keep thinking when reading your comment is “what kind of democracy?” What anarchists want is “democracy” too but it looks very, very different to the form of government we have in most “democracies”. Anarchists want political control by federations of cooperatives, or federations of cooperatives of cooperatives. What we have in most “democracies” is “representative democracy” where every few years we exercise highly diluted political power to put people in to power who came from an elite and isolated political class, are strongly/primarily influenced by money, and make sweeping decisions from very far away.

What anarchists want is a world where every day people are regularly voting on important issues affecting their collective, and nominating delegates to vote on their behalf when voting in federation-wide issues. Notably delegates are typically understood to only vote as already agreed upon by a collective and they are recallable at any time.

This is a super rough description but the point is I don’t think it’s meaningful to talk about “democracy” as a monolith. I think anarchism is democracy too and I think it’s a much more effective form of democracy than the type we have most commonly today.

We can barely get 40% turnout on huge generationally dramatic elections but we’re gonna vote weekly on minutae?

It's a very different system. When you are part of a cooperative, you are worker and management in one. (We need an educational system that prepares people for this. It is totally doable but obviously today's workforce does not have the training for this.)

When you are part of a cooperative, you will periodically need to vote on internal issues. Once a month you may need to vote in a regional issue. But you are showing up to work and everyone takes a few minutes to vote on something they are deeply involved with. No one would be voting weekly on national policy.

If you want to understand how such a system could be organized, you could see the imperfect but very interesting Mondragon Corporation of Spain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

There’s an excellent capital, capitol, Das Kapital, capital pun in here somewhere.