These are good points, but, I think, missing an important part of the story. The duty of citizens to be informed and reasonable doesn't get talked about much these days, even though the intellectual justification for liberalism was predicated upon it, and there have ever been doubts about whether the populace was up to the task (for example, as expressed by de Tocqueville).

As our society has grown in complexity, we have not really been keeping pace by training everyone to handle that degree of complexity.