I mean, for the majority of the country’s history, huge portions of its population had literally no democracy due to no right to vote. But I guess we’ll ignore that.
Don’t forget the millions of felons who still don’t. In Florida they passed a direct referendum to give them their franchise back, but the state government employed legal fuckery to prevent it from working as intended.
I never said mistakes weren’t made. Class war is war and war has collateral damage. The problem here is the total idealistic rejection of “authoritarianism”, where every single thing that has ever worked is classed as such and therefore made off-limits.