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"So we have never been a democracy?"
nope, founded by mostly wealthy white male elite landowners, the original oligarchy, that FEARED the uneducated, unruly, poor, dirty demos, creating the Electoral College as protective barrier between the feared election of a tyrant by the feared demos.
The higher class EC was to nullify the will of the people and elect a President acceptable the oligarchy.
FFs were so democratic that they excluded from voting all women, blacks, Indians.
The FFs also created the non-proportional, anti-democratic Senate, which now has been weaponized by the contemporary oligarchy as barrier against the demos and as means to politicize the Federal judiciary
"Or we were a democracy during certain periods (please name them)"
The wealthy male oligarchy has always been a threat to USA, as it has been always in human history.
The most democratic periods were FDR's 1930s progressivism (violently resisted by the oligarchy) through the mid-70s,
and then the WWII postwar period where the oligarchy was heavily taxed and the Repugs actually gave a tiny about governing for all of America.
Since the oligarchy became energized, focused, organized by Lewis Powell's famous memo in the early 1970's, America of the non-oligarchy has been going to the s, while the oligarchy has "returned America to historical form", ruled by the oligarchy, with Capital enslaving Labor to indebted penury.
