Our democracy in the US has lasted ~250 years despite all the nonsense from the rich and powerful. So I think enough of the voting public pays attention to keep things afloat. It has been a slow march downward imo, but nothing unrecoverable.

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but the US seems to go in cycles. That's how democracies seem to end up working, the public gets annoyed enough and demands change, so things get better for a time and then slowly get worse. Then the cycle repeats. It's basically two steps forward, one step back, repeat ad infinitum. Just think, 100 years ago we got women's suffrage, and now that's a given and we're fighting over abortion and equal pay. 100 years before that we were fighting over literal slavery. Some years down the road, we'll likely take those as a given and be fighting over something else.

Democracy works, it's just a messy process that can take a while. But it has worked so far pretty well.