I'm sorry to say but I think all you guys who think that the U.S. and other western nations are not a democracy are wrong. A democracy does NOT have to be a direct democracy in order to be a democracy. Just read up on it. It's not like I'm making these things uo.

Despite global concerns about democracy, more than half of countries are democratic

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/14/more-than-half-of-countries-are-democratic/

How Americans see their country and their democracy

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...eir-democracy/

A democracy is a political system with institutions that allows citizens to express their political preferences, has constraints on the power of the executive, and provides a guarantee of civil liberties. In an autocracy, political preferences cannot be expressed and citizens are not guaranteed civil liberties. Anocracies (a term we’ll often use in this entry) are regimes that fall in between — they are neither fully autocratic nor democratic. https://ourworldindata.org/democracy