Unless by "true democracies" you meant "direct democracies" since that's absolutely true, almost no one does.
I see current self-claimed "democracies" as a mix of Oligarchy, Technocracy and Bureaucracy, with Democracy influencing a tiny fraction of actual results of government action in citizens' lives.
And I don't see a path to a truly democratic system without a major cultural change and, most importantly, change in the individual level.
Even as a representative democracy, the distribution of power is by Supreme Court decision not one-citizen, one-vote, one unit of power over the government.
The US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission essentially that money was free speech and so its effects on elections could not be limited.
So the wealthy, or any wealthy interests internationally that have national entities that can spend money, have a hugely disproportionate hold on elections due to their ability to frame the information and motives behind elections, often with large amounts of coordinated misinformation.
So both financially, and informationally, the US democracy is not only legally corrupt, but any corporation that needs to negotiate with the government at any level, is virtually forced into participating in that legal corruption or be at a severe disadvantage.
The non-wealthy also suffer from that severe disadvantage, but have no wealth to balance it. So in the zero sum game of power politics, they have lost considerable power relative to any formal democracy, representative or not.
The legal corruption is both self-perpetuating and a malignant motivator for new scales and means of further corruption. The people in government, and people with money, are both being selected and incentivized, with stick and carrot, to be, and to further enable via their levers on government, even worse systemic corruption.
The US is not a healthy representative democracy and it isn't unreasonable to wonder if it is on a runaway path to worse outcomes without a clear mechanism for a turnaround in sight.
All assignments to the Supreme Court and its Circuits follow a Technocracy system, not a Democracy.
Citizens in their daily affairs are subject much more to a Bureaucracy system than to the results of a Democratic system of government.
The "intelligence community", for example, part of this Bureaucratic system of government, has extremely strong power.
This is true for the US and most - if not all - other self-claimed "democracies" nowadays.
I think Democracy accounts for <50% of what governments can influence in our lives. I'd personally say it's less than 10%, but being conservative. Anyway, it's certainly not the majority of it, so I wouldn't say we live in a Democracy. It's a mix of Technocracy/Bureaucracy, with a thin veil of Democracy.
It's what the people who want to shift the power from democracy like to say (including the empty, general nature). We don't live in perfect democracies, of course, but we will never live in perfect anything - these are human institutions, and it's humans all the way down.
But lots of powerful people and institutions invest enormous amounts of resources in persuading the public - the entire world of news opinion (including, first among peers, most of Murdoch's news operations), massive disinformation operations, all the corporate PR spin, etc. etc. etc. Those are enormous investments for something that doesn't matter.
No person I've ever admired, current or historical, ever advised despair and quitting. It's a sure way to lose, and hand over your power to someone else. Who are you handing it to?
