The United States never was a democracy. Nowhere in the US constitution are citizens guaranteed a democracy or even a conditional right to vote.
I don’t feel like I will have any say in our elections next year, even as a citizen with the right to vote. Why should minorities wait in hours-long lines instead of working just to pick between Biden and Trump? Are the Democrats really going to help the working class this time instead of the corporations who fund them or will they just defer to the Republicans like during the Obama years when they had a supermajority?
I would argue that the policy of democratic centralism in China is much more of a democracy, where citizens can have a say in the actual policies of the country.