Well no true Scotsman and so on.

Even in old and established democracies, there's usually a large gap between what is said of the democracy, and what the democracy actually is and does.

That was my cynism. Democracy seems to be used as a wildcard to say "we are the good people" awfully lot recently, which gets my attention.

Yeah, but when your argument is that $BAD_THING still occurs in a democracy (which it certainly does), then it doesn’t help if you weaken that to a “supposed” democracy, because then the counterargument is that it wouldn’t happen in a real democracy. Whereas your aim is to argue that (real) democracy isn’t a panacea.

Point taken. Thanks for correcting me and actually taking the time to understand what I was really trying to say. And thanks for the very appropriate word suggestion. "democracy isn’t a panacea" is indeed a very concise way of stating what I wanted to say.