I am predicting (and hoping) that the concept of democracy will continue to shift towards ever greater inclusion and increased human rights as it has in the past two centuries, and a future vision of democracy would disqualify the current system as undemocratic for some of the points above.
Just like how we don’t view pre-civil rights USA as democratic by modern standards. For example, we would never consider a country with legalized slavery to be democratic today. Similarly a future concept of democracy is unlikely to consider a country which practices the death penalty to be democratic by that hypothetical future standard.
I would consider a country with universal suffrage, direct democracy, and legalized slavery to be a Democracy. It's unlikely and pretty shitty, but it's certainly a Democracy.
This twisting of definitions is the same thing happening to "racist". Some people only consider what was previously called "systemic racism" to be the singular definition of "racism" and pretend the old definition does not exist.
I wouldn’t, and neither would most people, and neither would most in academia. At some point (probably around the 1960s) both human rights and equal rights became integral to the concept of democracy. You may not like it, but that is how most people (and most academics) use the concept. The standards for human rights and equal rights are also evolving and today includes stuff like indigenous rights, equal access, universal education, etc.
In the 1970s people were debating whether Apartheid South Africa was democratic or not (it obviously wasn’t; not even by the standards of the time) and today people are debating whether Israel is a democracy (again; it obviously isn’t) but if we apply the standards of the 1940s to both Apartheid South Africa, and today’s Israel, they would both be considered democratic.
And just to clarify, the concept of racism is equally evolving. Much of what we consider racist today would not have been considered racist in the 1980s. The (then considered non-racist) behavior of the 1980s was equally harmful as the same behavior today. But humanity has simply learned, and updated the concept of racism to include this behavior. This is the nature of knowledge and the human experience, we learn more things, and adjust our concepts to fit with our ever increasing knowledge.
Just like how we don’t view pre-civil rights USA as democratic by modern standards. For example, we would never consider a country with legalized slavery to be democratic today. Similarly a future concept of democracy is unlikely to consider a country which practices the death penalty to be democratic by that hypothetical future standard.