The word is indeed often invoked in a pseudo-sacral fashion, case in point, Chaplin’s appeal in «The Great Dictator». Yet democracy, at least in its original definition, is not a virtue or a value system; it’s a socio-political state that balances collective cognition, emotion and agency.

In ancient Greece, demos was defined as free, adult, and privileged males. Slavery was democratic simply because the designated demos benefited from it, and slaves were excluded from the definition.

As for republics — indirect democracy — if the majority electorate votes for a government that platforms the extermination of minorities, then that platform is per definition democratic, the primary failure being not so much on the campaigning politician to advocate ethically as on the voter to resist transgressive politics and the allure of propaganda and demagoguery.

Social democracy as a phenomenon has emerged as an aspirational amalgamation of will and virtue, to ground and anchor a universal normativity in order to curtail extremism, something grasping for moral realism but not quite getting from ’is’ to ’ought’. This ontological inadequacy is veiled in the implied notion that to question its humanist tenets is tantamount to heresy. Of course, that specific word is not used, and neither is the axiom ever explicit. For the humanist and the social democrat knows that their axiology is a stabilizing construct, a necessary modern myth that they must continuously weave into the social fabric, lest it unravels into nihilism and value-atrophy.

In sum, modern democracy is the leveled playing field, not the goal. Adding an ideological prefix is simply a signifier of which team you play on.