For what it’s worth, I read that comment as drawing attention to the fact that democracy, while powerful, can be misdirected. People make mistakes, and in large groups, peoples make mistakes, especially when working with a complex set of top-down rules that we’ve built up over centuries for the purpose of controlling other people in a world that has had billions of years to develop its own complexities. As an aside, that fragility is why such top-down structures are so rare in nature.
A lot of housing and transportation problems are caused by the regulation being too local.