> Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties.

This is an entirely modern idea and really has nothing to do with the concept. It's the typical leftist tendency to appropriate a word that people see as good and then redefine it to be something which the leftist themselves want, and then hope that people still associate it with good.

It's the same thing with the word nation, love, marriage and a multitude of other concepts.

> Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.

Zulus making laws for Xhosas is most definitely Zulus ruling over Xhosas. Just because the Zulus also give the Xhosas rights to vote does not make them one people or mean that all of a sudden, Xhosas are ruling themselves.

Demos is a synonym for ethnos, and for all of history except maybe the last 80 years people would have understood democracy as self-determination of ethnic groups. The reason why everyone wanted democracy has always been that peoples, i.e. ethnic groups, want to rule themselves, and don't want to be ruled by others.

If Palestinians are 10% of the electorate in a Jewish nation state then they can never write laws for themselves, they can never rule themselves. There can be no democracy for Palestinians in a situation like that.

If Zulus and Xhosas each make up 50% of the electorate then voting is not democratic, it's a battle for one ethnic group to try and rule the other, and the weapon is just voting.

Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Zulus, Zulus and Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Afrikaners, Afrikaners don't want to be ruled by the English, Poles don't want to be ruled by Germans or Russians, Russians don't want to be ruled over by Lithuanians, Jews don't want to be ruled over by Arabs, and Palestinians don't want to be ruled by Jews.

Everyone knows this, even you. Redefining words won't change this. Nominalism won't change this.

Almost invariably, even under the most favourable conditions of rule by another ethnic group, an ethnic group will still want to rule themselves.

«What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.»

The only people who didn't vote along ethnic lines were westerners in the past 40 to 80 or so years, and that is rapidly changing and will almost entirely disappear in less than 50 years.

You can already see that one of the biggest problems in Western Europe is that the liberal establishment itself refuse to hold non-westerners to account to western laws because they feel that it would be unfair to enforce one people's laws on another people.

This is why rapists and murderers get lighter sentences than people who say the wrong thing in Britain, as long as the rapist or murderer is non-western enough.

This is why foreign rioters who incite violence get no sentence, while native rioters get the book thrown at them.

3 or 5 member multi-member voting districts determined by a geographic clustering algorithm using approval voting.

Their methodology is freely available, you can easily find the answers to those questions.

Then check V-Dem, you might argue they're flawed as well but then I'd suggest you to provide counterexamples for why the US should be considered a functioning democracy, and is not on the way to a fully authoritarian state.

It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely better than this lazy dismissal.