I don’t think I care enough
You don't care to find out if the thing you have been calling "democracy" your entire life even qualifies as democratic?
Fair enough, I guess - maybe the people calling themselves "democrats" not lifting a finger to stop fascism hasn't convinced you to question the lies these very same people have been selling you since birth... but that could never be me.
Why are you mad at me?
Ummm... I'm not mad at you.
I'm trying to show you that you aren't asking to get democracy back (because that's something you never had).
What you are asking for is to have the "good cop" back - the very "good cop" that is right now busy handing you over to the bad one.
If I were (as a thought exercise) to consider your metrics for democracy valid, I'd have to enquire as to what the point of democracy even is if it comes with fascism as a built-in feature - which, of course, is perfectly acceptable if we were to use your metrics.
And that's before we even get into the nitty gritty of how your metrics of democracy solves the fundamentally violent and fundamentally irreconcilable incompatibility between democratic values and the capitalist mode of production.
Depends on you threshold but we have had it for a while
Getting to "choose" which pack of political racketeers gets to be the public face of capitalist looting and pillaging falls outside my threshold... which means that we've never had anything that can be called "democracy" with a straight face.
If we accept the liberals' definition of democracy we might just as well accept the tankie's definition of socialism, too - both are equally warped and vile.
I’d be happy to just get democracy back.
When did we have democracy?
See how absurd this statement is?
Liberalism is literally the ideology of the status quo now.
Is it absurd to point that out, too?
Prefiguration is a theory of praxis
Soooo... the failure of anarchism to actually preconfigure anything since the end of WW2 in the face of massive liberal counter-insurgency is perhaps tied to anarchist's theories about preconfiguration not being remotely good enough - if they even exist at all?
Bringing about things like the 40-hour week.
Can you show me anywhere in the world where anarchism is as strongly represented in labor movements as it was in Spain during the 1930s?
Looking at the past does not make the present any better.
Anarchism doesn’t have to become the sociopolitical system to be beneficial.
So what should it be then? A vanguard in everything but name?
Look into prefiguration
I'd love to... but where is it? Every time I ask anarchists this, they point me to social projects such as that happening in northern Syria and Chiappas in Mexico - social projects that reject the anarchist label. And I don't exactly blame them for rejecting it, either - trying to "preconfigure" something when your theory is too damn orthodox to even allow you to understand what "preconfiguring" should actually look like is a pretty obvious sociopolitical dead-end.
They rescue(d) and support(ed) refugees, fed people all over the world, setup bail funds and so much more.
This is all great - but lots of organizations and movements are doing direct action of all kinds. Can you seriously tell me that this represents a functional political movement that would be capable of surviving and thriving if a convulsive revolution were to kick off tomorrow?
Shouting down fascists is child's play in comparison to their liberal cousins.
You need to make those eye-holes bigger.
If all you want is to have the "good" cop to come back, and to be subject to the carrot instead of the stick - fine. You do you.
But is it too much to ask for you to simply be honest about it?