I see how suffrage within a constrained context like in the USA leads to awful results.

However, if democracy is stuffed into the small box of suffrage, its potential is limited. If, instead, it’s spread so that it grows everyone’s capabilities, then you see something very different. You see hundreds of thousands or millions of people in the street, demanding change against authoritarianism, against unnecessary cruelty, against egotism (“me me me my nation my family my religion my clan my precious me me me”).

So democracy tends to optimize for capacity building, democratic value orientations, and institutional capacity construction. In other words, it makes people more capable, it makes people care more about freedom for themselves and others, and it makes institutions guarantee that people can build their capacities to be free.

In fact, you can quote me on this, but the USA right now is way more anti-democratic than its people are and therefore there will be massive protests. Those protests will not be against democracy; they are democracy in action.

You can check out Christian Welzel and the World Value Survey literature to see why I say what I say.