I agree with this analysis (and I support the Democrats in all those things you mentioned).
What happened was not just increased talk of our government being a democracy - it was also that our republican form of government, over the course of the years, actually made itself a democracy, step by step, from the Twelfth Amendment to the Seventeenth Amendment to the various judicial rulings of the 1960s that recognized the "one person, one vote" standard, among many other steps.
The difficulty with the "We're not a democracy, we're a republic" argument is the same difficulty with monarchists today who have to deal with the fact that their beloved legitimate rulers abdicated or otherwise ceded power legitimately. We certainly were not a democracy in 1789, given the number of people disenfranchised, but we chose to become one, which is an entirely intra-vires thing for a republican government to do.
What happened was not just increased talk of our government being a democracy - it was also that our republican form of government, over the course of the years, actually made itself a democracy, step by step, from the Twelfth Amendment to the Seventeenth Amendment to the various judicial rulings of the 1960s that recognized the "one person, one vote" standard, among many other steps.
The difficulty with the "We're not a democracy, we're a republic" argument is the same difficulty with monarchists today who have to deal with the fact that their beloved legitimate rulers abdicated or otherwise ceded power legitimately. We certainly were not a democracy in 1789, given the number of people disenfranchised, but we chose to become one, which is an entirely intra-vires thing for a republican government to do.