I've no doubt that if we plopped you down in the middle of, say, modern-day Russia, you'd be able to observe a few important differences in the political organization of the two countries.

Fewer than you would a year or nine ago, certainly, and a lot of people are working very hard on closing the gap.

Democracy is a spectrum. There have always been significant flaws with American democracy, but you'd be mad to not observe significant, active regression and effort by the government to replace it with something else.