Democracy as a literal political system was traditionally rejected as a bad political philosophy, the “two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner”, which promoted a “tyranny of the majority”.

Plato famously rejected democracy in his book “The Republic”. Modern anarcho-capitalist writer Hans-Hermann Hoppe wrote an anti-democratic book, “Democracy: The God That Failed” which argued many bad effects come from transitions of governments from traditional monarchist governments to modern “democratic” governments.

The Republic of the U.S. was structured to minimize the problems of democracy (or “mob rule”); so the U.S. is “anti-democracy” in this respect.

The word “democracy” has been generically used to mean a sense of participation in society and politics, or of “having a say” in what decisions are made, or of encouraging individual initiative. These kinds of things aren’t really intrinsic to democracy as a political system, though.

Sometimes it seems “democracy” is used to mean promoting certain “freedoms”; but in the U.S. things like “civil liberties” are more associated with a philosophy of “libertarianism” or “anarchism”. Yet, as stated above, certain anarchists (like Hoppe) regard democracy as a sort of antithesis of freedom, perhaps kind of like a “slavery to the majority”, and not as a “liberating force”.

(I guess the wiki article on “democracy” goes in to things from an “ancap” perspective: https://infogalactic.com/info/Democracy#Anarchist)

So is “democracy” just a vague malleable word, kind of like how it might be confusing for leftwing people to say they are “republicans”, meaning they believe in a government that’s a republic, without being “Republicans”, or members of the U.S. Republican party?

(The word “libertarian” I think I’ve read for example, originally referred more exclusively to “libertarian socialism”, whereas today it might be thought to mean “libertarian capitalism”)

So is there merely some semantics confusion about what the word “democracy” means, or a more widely-agreed upon meaning of the word that I have failed to grasp?