Most politically educated people will know a few points against democracy. Typically people only know that voters tend to be uneducated, politicians tend to be corrupt, the two party system is a joke, people tend to vote resources towards themselves through gibs, etc. But what is often missing from these discussions is a more abstract and fundamental understanding of what the ideology of democracy is and how it conflicts with humanity at a deeper level.
Many arguments against democracy have been done to death and are just distractions from the core issues at this point. Many anti-democratic arguments are also made within the framework of liberalism. These arguments then serve to affirm the core assumptions behind the democratic ideology, they won't convince anyone that a viable alternative exists and they don't direct any creative efforts towards achieving that alternative. An example of such an argument would be "Democracy is bad because the majority could vote to violate my individual rights".
First we should define the functions of democracy in specific terms. Democracy is the rule of the majority. Voting is effectively a ritual of consent, consent to be ruled by whatever the largest quantity of voters decides. Voting is a ritual which is performed to validate the authority of the democratic government. This participatory ritual is core to the ideology of democracy, which must exercise the agency of the individual because the individual is viewed as the cause to the effect of government. Government then exists because individuals collectively agreed that it was necessary, according to the ideology of democracy. This places the individual in a position of both moral and practical superiority over his government.
With this basic understanding of democracy we can develop unique and insightful criticisms.
Our core conclusion is that democracy has an unhealthy obsession with quantity which leaves it open to a critique derived from the dichotomy of quantity vs quality. Democracy arbitrarily assigns moral priority to a quantity of voters (the majority) to the detriment of the quality of political decisions and the quality of political actors. Democracy values the majority consensus over a historically qualitative form of power such as divine kingship, kingship being qualitative because the king has the quality of being ordained by God and the quality of simply being the guy who owns the place. This rationalization which assigns undue significance to a quantity is what we call a quantitative abstraction, quantitative abstractions drive a lot of issues such as the excessive focus on GDP growth as well.
The fact that an outcome is the result of consensus is all that matters to democracy, even if the outcome is bad or even evil. This disregard for the quality of political outcomes creates an opportunity for a hypothetical system to compete which does make high quality decisions which are also backed by a quantitative consensus. The ends and the means are both independently justified in this hypothetical system. Historically, this has really only be achieved by aligning your politics with a religious faith. If both your means and your ends are divinely inspired and seek only to glorify God who is by definition always correct about everything then it is much more difficult for a moral inconsistency to arise. This is part of why secular projects such as constitutional republics and communist dictatorships fall flat when it comes to convincing their peoples that their political activites are morally justifiable. Faith in God is a more robust moral foundation than a combined faith in the voting ritual, the validity of majority rule, the rights of the individual, the integrity of politicians, etc. Democracy has many ideological points of failure, but for a religious system to fail you would at some point be forced to specifically defeat its strong faith in God.
The egalitarian nature of democracy will tend to oppose social hierarchy. Social hierarchy meaning things like patriarchal rule, the caste system, pecking orders, and more. Social hierarchies place people in social roles and assign duties based on their qualitative traits, we may also call them qualitative hierarchies. Men are given the duty of family leadership because leadership is understood to be a masculine quality for example. Democracy opposes this concept of qualitative hierarchy and grants social equality to everybody. Political participation becomes maximally inclusive in part through the voting ritual, meaning that the quality of political discourse is reduced to be inclusive to people with low IQs and poor education.
With the death of qualitative hierarchy the personal desire for social distinction does not suddenly disappear. This results in a tendency to reduce social distinction to that which is quantitative, it is an effort to forcibly manipulate human nature into integration with the ideology of democracy. Examples of such quantitative metrics would be material wealth or follower count on social media. In a superficial sense this trend could be viewed as a good thing because it encourages people to earn their own social distinction by working to accumulate some number of something, people are supposedly judged by their fruits. But within a traditional social hierarchy people are still judged by their fruits, they are just guided towards the fruit of mastering their respective duties qualitatively. For example, the traditional patriarch is judged by the virtue and skill he displays in performing his leadership duties, not by some measurement of his productive output. Earned distinction still exists within qualitative hierarchy, it is just earned through less quantitative methods. When framed in a dichotomy of quantitative vs qualitative social distinction like this it is clear which is superior, climbing the economic ladder to obtain more wealth is horrible and unfulfilling, seemingly by design, accumulating likes on social media is unfulfilling pseudosocial overstimulation, but being a good and virtuous parent is some of the greatest fulfillment there is.
The ideology of democracy has an obsession with quantity which influences society to pursue materialistic decadence and quantitative statuses which leave its people unfulfilled and burnt out. Their efforts are wasted and the opportunity for them to achieve a meaningful existence by achieving mastery within their social duties with dedicated virtue is lost. It is important to note that this reign of quantity does not originate entirely in democracy, but is related to and perpetuated by its ethics and rituals. The biggest point of origin would be rationalism and the scientific worldview which demand that all things be calculable and measurable.
Lastly, democracy is an inversion of the metaphysical principle that the higher cannot proceed out of the lower. Just as the lesser grape comes from the greater vine, the lower individual owes his individuality to the higher society that taught it to him, a thriving population is always the result of good leadership at the top, lesser creation is the result of the greater creator. Within the democratic framework, the general population is placed in a supposed position of superiority over the very organizational force which allows them to be defined as a distinct population in the first place. This inversion is impossible and its impossibility has been demonstrated by the recent neoliberal dystopian democracy we find ourselves in, where the government is clearly the one in control. This should not be a surprising outcome, since the government until its inevitable destabilization is the higher wheher or not we like to pretend otherwise. This inversion also contributes to an unhealthy mindset where the individual's life is not considered to be a part of a greater collective purpose, this results in many cases of individuals becoming socially isolated and unfulfilled because they have not been led to participate in something greater than themselves.
Hopefuly this different approach to understanding democracy helps you to visualize a cultural escape route and a superior alternative system. Having these concepts well developed ahead of time is necessary to seize any opportunities for a power grab and great social change in the future.