@Pat She was wrong on a lot of points, but it was subtle and she had the general idea well enough... A democracy is not a specific type of government, it is a property that many many different forms of government may adopt.

What she meant was, and she is correct, is that we are NOT a "direct democracy". This is an understanding linguistic confusion as the other technical term for direct democracy is "pure democracy". What we are, specifically is a "democratic republic" the reason people wrongly claim it isnt a democracy is either because they are confused with direct democracy or the fact that a democratic republic is usually just shortened to call it a "republic" or "representative government".

The wording is just confusing I guess. But you are right in your OP of course, the USA is a type of government that has a property of democracy, assuming we agree the voting system is fairly honest and not hijacked.

@freemo

Agree. It's mostly a terminology issue. Also, I think a few people conflate the political parties into it as the names of the parties are similar to those terms.

"Democratic republic" is the most proper terminology, but internationally that phrase has negative connotations because a lot of smaller autocratic governments adopt that phrasing to describe their governments, e.g., Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former Democratic Republic of Vietnam, among many others. (As if that's going to fool anybody.)

@Pat To be fair with big corperations buying elections and the system rigged to prevent third parties competing with the main to party's one could argue we are no longer a democracy either, just a pale imitation of one. So we arent all that different in some regards to other countries that are on the surface democratic but in reality corrupt and not very democratic at all.

If I am being particularly cynical I'd say the only main difference between the democratic aspect of north korea vs america is that Korea effectively has a system that is rigged to only have one party where the USA is rigged to only have two. I mean they do have elections afterall, even if it is a mockery.