Yet, citizens of China have enjoyed a steady increase in the quality of life across the board, while the opposite has been happening in US. Meanwhile, US is an oligarchy and not a democracy. A long term study from Princeton shows that the main predictor of any law being passed is whether it's favorable to the rich. The public opinion does not matter:
>What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...