I think it is important to understand that democracies come in various shapes. If that were not true then why would there be a Democracy Index published by "The Economist Intelligence Unit".
https://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index
I don't necessarily want to discuss the specifics of that report but it clearly shows that there are very democratic democracies and not so democratic democracies, plus hybrid systems and totalitarian regimes. Sure, that's just one way to look at it but it makes sense.
How often have I heard american politicians speaking about bringing democracy to the world in the context of past armed conflict? Why would the US want to bring democracy to other countries if it's allegedly not a democracy itself?
How a nation describes its own political system is not always a reliable indicator of the true form of government. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was about as democratic as China is today. And the US are a democracy and a Republic, even though the word democracy does not appear in the constitution. It's not just me who "believes" this:I often hear people argue that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. But that’s a false dichotomy. A common definition of “republic” is, to quote the American Heritage Dictionary, “A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them” — we are that. A common definition of “democracy” is, “Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives” — we are that, too.
The United States is not a direct democracy, in the sense of a country in which laws (and other government decisions) are made predominantly by majority vote. Some lawmaking is done this way, on the state and local levels, but it’s only a tiny fraction of all lawmaking. But we are a representative democracy, which is a form of democracy.
And indeed the American form of government has been called a “democracy” by leading American statesmen and legal commentators from the Framing on. It’s true that some Framing-era commentators made arguments that distinguished “democracy” and “republic”; see, for instance,
The Federalist (No. 10), though even that first draws the distinction between “pure democracy” and a “republic,” only later just saying “democracy.” But even in that era, “representative democracy” was understood as a form of democracy, alongside “pure democracy”:
John Adams used the term “representative democracy” in 1794; so did
Noah Webster in 1785; so did
St. George Tucker in his 1803 edition of Blackstone; so did
Thomas Jefferson in 1815. Tucker’s Blackstone likewise uses “democracy” to describe a representative democracy, even when the qualifier “representative” is omitted.
Likewise, James Wilson, one of the main drafters of the Constitution and one of the first Supreme Court Justices,
defended the Constitution in 1787 by speaking of the three forms of government being the “monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical,” and said that in a democracy the sovereign power is “inherent in the people, and is either exercised by themselves or by their representatives.” And Chief Justice John Marshall — who helped lead the fight in the 1788 Virginia Convention for ratifying the U.S. Constitution —
likewise defended the Constitution in that convention by describing it as implementing “democracy” (as opposed to “despotism”), and without the need to even add the qualifier “representative.”
To be sure, in addition to being a representative democracy, the United States is also a constitutional democracy, in which courts restrain in some measure the democratic will. And the United States is therefore also a constitutional republic. Indeed, the United States might be labeled a constitutional federal representative democracy. But where one word is used, with all the oversimplification that this necessary entails, “democracy” and “republic” both work. Indeed, since direct democracy — again, a government in which all or most laws are made by direct popular vote — would be impractical given the number and complexity of laws that pretty much any state or national government is expected to enact, it’s unsurprising that the qualifier “representative” would often be omitted. Practically speaking, representative democracy is the only democracy that’s around at any state or national level. Source:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...r-a-democracy/