Only if a problem is reduced to a binary state. A lot of folks here on HN work with computers where true is true and false is false and there is nothing in the middle - but that's not how the world works, nearly everything we deal with is non-binary in nature, both SF and Houston have housing regulations, but those regulations are vastly different and if you tried to group housing regulations by severity you'd have to be extremely reductionist to end up with two categories.

This isn't actually unique to democracy and might be less achievable in a democratic system but all of politics is supposed to be about compromise, those housing regulations might get loosened up, but that might lower land values and decrease the amount of spending allocated to law enforcement or park maintenance or a wide array of things.

I'd prefer a short summary of democracy to read closer to:

> Democracy, some people win, some people lose, most people grump.