Safety in numbers: Strengthening resistance to anti-democratic challenges

How might we better understand the idea of democracy so that we can do more to defend it from current anti-democratic challenges? A starting point is to accept that there is no such thing as ‘democracy’. There are only ‘democracies’. Robert Dahl’s assertion that ‘there is no democratic theory — there are only democratic theories’ echoes Lenin’s concern with the term ‘democracy-in-general’. What bothered Lenin was that specific types of democracy can, when looked for, be found in empirical form in the world, but democracy-in-general cannot.