Honest questions? What is wrong with the educational system in the USA and why is the following failed mantra so prevalent?
We dont live in a democracy.
We live in a representative republic.
A second time in as many weeks that such a glaring failure is evident!
I'll repost what I presented then to correct another's identical error:
Dude, you warrant a lecture to help put an end to such lunacy.
You are a democracy without a monarch as head-of-state. The term of a republic goes back for millenia.
Democracy is exactly what you just stated your "representative republic" to be. A form of representative government where those representatives are elected by a limited portion of the population with all held to a high set of written laws in the form of a constitution.
I know of no state where democracy is open to all present within. Restrictions upon who those representatives may be or who may even vote for them differs among states. Be it only those who are deemed to be adequate citizens, property owners, a specific sex, race, of certain age, status of criminal convictions, party affiliation, etc. All or a portion of such restrictions upon who may vote for representation have or continue to exist in the USA and all other states in this world. The elected representatives form the government.
The term democracy itself also includes constitutional parliamentary monarchies through to the extreme of a Communist Politburo or Qaddafi's Libyan People's Committees. A quantifiable metric for a level of democracy is commonly down to how pervasive into the society it is for people who are permitted to vote for representation. Upon such lines, the USA was rather tardy in providing higher democratic freedoms in comparison to some other western states who more quickly provided full voting rights to wider segments of their population.
The corruption within a democratic system becomes another matter that will also include the level of judicial Independence from political interference, the professionalism of law enforcement agencies, a responsible and independent media, and ultimately to the maturity of the society as a whole to be informed and assess critical decisions.