I don’t believe ethno-nationalists criticize contemporary democracies for insufficiently empowering the people. I don’t think they necessarily want the people to be empowered. Many of them are favorably disposed towards authoritarianism. Their concern seems to be that contemporary democracies are attacking or are hostile towards a particular people.

If your agreement is “at best partial”, it’s because you’ve defined “democracy” in terms of its failure mode, which is absurd. It’s like defining monarchy as a system whereby a man enslaves a mass of people to build monuments to himself, or whereby an inbred, mentally deficient dynast ruins his kingdom. Or like defining corporate rule as a system whereby stockholders put in boards of directors who put their buddies into executive positions to squeeze all the capital out of the stockholders’ corporation.

Is your first sentence the key (“In order for genuine democracy to function, a meaningful degree of free speech and free association must exist.”)? In that case, my agreement is at best partial. There might be an important sense in which such liberties provide a foundation for the construction of democracy, but the functioning of democracy then reliably erodes them. Suppression of liberty in the name of the people is what democracy does. Does history offer any examples of democratic processes generating real (= negative) liberties?

Do you disagree with my comment about contemporary democracies?

Anti-democratic systems can of course call themselves “democracies,” “people’s democracies,” and so forth, but that does not make them so.

Contemporary states in which mass media are concentrated in the hands of tiny, totalitarian minorities with no one else permitted a say in public discourse, that formally designate pornography “free speech” and proscribe core political and historical speech as “hate,” “racism,” “anti-Semitism,” “Holocaust denial,” “disparaging the memory of the dead,” etc., are not democracies.

Scorn democracy as zealously as you will, the fact is that contemporary “democratic” countries hate it as much as you do.