History shows that to simply not the case. Individuals are bringing down democracies all the time. Especially presidential democracies are super vulnerable to this because the president has outsized power compared to the other branches of the government.

> Elections have consequences, but if those consequences are the loss of rights, then you never lived in a democracy to begin with.

So I guess these folks who live in a "real democracy" according to you just have the good government fairy swoop in when the people vote in a dictator.

At the end of the day, a democracy is just people, all the way down. It doesn't matter what laws you've written down, what courts you have, what procedures you've developed. If enough people stop believing in the enforcement of those laws, or court orders, or governmental norms, there is no deus ex machina.

Modern democracies have stuff like free press, strong legislative opposition, and unions which will mount an effective resistance when faced with a tyrant.

Both Italy and Argentina elected a pretty dictatorial rulers, but neither successfully removed any civil rights from their citizens as a result, as the democratic institutions mobilized an effective resistance.

As a comparison to the USA, in a healthy democracy, the protests we are seeing in LA would not be spontaneous and organically arise from normal everyday people, but they would be called for and organized by unions, civil rights organizations, opposition parties, etc.

EDIT: Thinking about this further, the lack of participation from unions, human rights organizations, opposition parties, etc. during the anti-ICE protests, is much more common in unambiguous dictatorships like Russia or Iran.

> This is a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy. In a democracy you cannot vote your self a dictator

Self-coups are a thing, and the best person to subvert a democracy is one who already wields considerable power within one. History is replit, unless you're doing the no-true-scottsman shuffle on the topic of democracy - if so, carry on.

The true Scotsman fallacy is not relevant here because the modern concept of democracy is a constantly evolving term. The modern democracy includes stuff like civil liberties, equal rights, human rights (including minority rights), and protections from tyranny. Many of these (particularly human rights) only arose in the post World War II era. Now coups do indeed happen, but those are the result of an entity overpowering the democratic institutions, not the result of people voting them selves a dictator. If the people vote them selves a dictator, then obviously at least some of the democratic institutions which are supposed to protect those rights were insufficient, or altogether absent.

Sensible modern democracies will have those features, but they're no more part of the definition than having seatbelts and airbags is part of the definition of what a car is (I guess the model t is the equivalent of ancient Athens here?).

I‘m not concerned with the definition of democracy, if it can even be defined. I‘m simply concerned with the modern concept of democracy, which includes stuff like civil liberties, minority rights, and—relevant here—protection of these rights from tyranny.

I don’t think our analogy is valid. A car is just a car, and the concept of a car has not changed since its invention. The modern democracy has been constantly evolving from its inception (I’m sure democratic societies existed even before ancient Athens), but nobody would consider a democracy from the 1800s a democracy if it existed today. Heck even USA would not pass until the civil rights era of the 1960s.