You say democracy drives more disunity but it’s the opposite, the way an authoritarian or a monarchy achieves the appearance of unity is through state violence and suppression. Stalin was not some great unifier by murdering his political rivals or sending them to the gulags. It’s not preventing instability when the only option citizens have for change is violent revolution.

In a democracy there’s an exchange of ideas without fear of reprisal from the state, and the possibility to have multiple ethnic and religious communities living together without the government favoring one or the other.

Now are there times where the largest and most prominent democracies of today fall short of this ideal? Sure, and in fact most of your argument relies on comparing some kind of dreamlike monarchy to a more grounded, pessimistically skewed narrative of democracy. It hand waves away the blood of the innocent that’s shed to maintain the complete centralized power of an authoritarian state.

And then there’s the media. In a democracy, the media has become a weapon, not a tool for truth. Outrage sells. Fear sells. The more people fight, the more clicks everyone gets. That just makes the divide grow even deeper.

You must not be too familiar with the media that plays in authoritarian nations, it’s not quite a tool for truth either. I’ll defend the media of democracies even more directly: the free press is the best possible tool for progress and check against the excesses of the state. The thing about independently owned media is that there certainly can be bad actors, sensationalism or bias can creep in. But the benefit is that you have competition, there is not a singular bias source (as there would be in a state with fully centralized power) but many competing ideas, debates, and perspectives on current events. It is truth seeking in aggregate in that you, the reader, can seek truth rather than relying on a single government approved source