It is a wicked problem that composes with other wicked problems to pose a wicked problem of a higher order.

Habermas in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)

makes it clear you need expert decision making and democratic participation and without them no system is sustainable. Yet these can't really be reconciled: the public often doesn't know enough to have a worthwhile opinion.

The last defense of democracy is Winston Churchill's "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried." What it promises is that you can depose bad leaders in an orderly way, not have good leadership. But today it fails to do even that and people are craving good leadership. In the US today it is not "make the trains run on time" but it is having trains at all -- so Xi's China can look a little appealing to some people, even myself on a bad day although I know better.

The argument that Trump represents a threat to democracy doesn't motivate most people in the US because our democracy lacks output legitimacy, whether it is really bad as people think it is an open question in my mind (I'm lucky enough to be a homeowner) but you just can't sell people on it -- the Schoolhouse Rock song and dance about How a bill becomes a law looks like tangled-up proceduralism and the last scene in the The Parallax View where a murdered politician careens on a golf cart through tables on the floor of a conference center is more how it feels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1OmcMDFR0Y

It's easy to say that the path to Eudaimonia today would involve ignoring politics but Nader and Pericles would agree that "If you're not turned on to politics, then politics will turn on you"