You suffer from extreme black and white thinking. There can either be full democracy or no democracy, right? In reality there are blemishes, deficits in a democracy. Some are quite minor, like an extremely well educated 15 year old not being allowed to vote.

More serious: foreign nationals who live in the same country aren't allowed to vote despite paying taxes and being subject to the laws. More serious still: Minorities and in general "Democratic" voters are kept from turning out by discriminative voter suppresion. That's a deficit on democracy. Or when you incarcerate a ton of people, especially with racial preference. Or when you take away bodily autonomy from women with a ban on abortion, when men cant get pregnant and have more ways to extricate themselves of those consequences. Black and white thinking is not the way