Nobody ever fights for democracy. They fight for material things: peace, land, and bread; liberation from colonialism; end to genocide; women’s rights. “Democracy” in the way it gets thrown around is just a bit of a floating signifier that maybe in some vague sense means due process and a Western style of governance that gives the appearance of offering certain rituals to the masses to make them think they have power, like giving your little sibling the controller when it’s not plugged in. Nobody fights for that. They get paid to “fight” for that.

The obvious counterexamples I think liberals would cite would be the French and American revolutions, to which I say that the fact these historical events have been mythologized as simple struggles for democracy and freedom from tyranny instead of multifaceted class struggles is proof of what I’m saying. The Montagnards clearly weren’t going for “freedom and democracy” or even just the idealistic notion of a society with strong human rights. They were going for, in a time before revolutionary theory was developed, communism, but were defeated by bourgeois Girondins and eventually formed a bourgeois republic. If you do a materialist analysis of the so-called American Revolution you get the opposite, that there was effectively no faction of the settlers who seeked a truly equitable and just new order, but a group of land and slave owning white men who wanted to secure their class position from the conflicting interests of the crown. Democracy doesn’t play a role there at all!