I have observed the leadership of Winston Churchill, and Anwar Sadat, and David Ben Gurion, and Mikhail Gorbachev. I have noted the destruction caused by Adolph Hitler, and Pol Pot, and the Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao. I have seen the economic changes caused purposely by Franklin D. Roosevelt and blindly by Ronald Reagan. The basic idea is that none of us is smart enough to tell another of us what to do.
Democracy means the rule of the majority tempered by respect for the rights of the individual.
Democracy and capitalism are inefficient systems, but they are the best we have been able to devise. Our collective intelligence as expressed in a democratic system reduces all our intelligence to that of the average which is pretty dumb. The liberal philosophy won't work because it assumes we are smarter than we are. The conservative philosophy doesn't work because it doesn't give us credit for ever being able to better our society by tampering with the system. The conservative philosophy is to leave the free market system to fend for itself because we are not smart enough to fine tune it and that government is best which governs least.