[redial]

> 1) Nobody really thinks any system is perfect.

You should have stopped there.

Basic democracy is so ambiguous really anything qualifies, and by all accounts, China has basic democracy. In fact, they have infinitely more democracy pre-revolution France did.

And the fact that even in the world of today, more than 2000 years after the Greeks, democracy is not universal prove your second point is not such a sure thing as you wanted it to be.