Our definition of what is and isn’t a democracy is significantly different than that of liberals. We wouldn’t consider Europe and America to be democracies meaning that we have no sympathies for those style of governments and societies.

To contextualize this, one thing you have to understand is that there are many formulations of democracy that have existed historically. Athenian democracy is very different from liberal democracy, which is in turn very different from democratic centralism (the formulation most used by Marxist states). And there were probably many forms of democracy that hunter-gatherers and indigenous peoples used (which I unfortunately don’t know much about).

The main problems with how democracy is talked about in liberal philosophy (the hegemonic philosophy) is that only the liberal formulation of democracy is considered valid, even if its performance has historically been extremely subpar. Furthermore, class is completely ignored, as all “democracies” have existed in service of a class (in athens, for the slave owners, in liberal republics, for the bourgeoise, in ML republics, for the proles).

Because we do not consider liberal democracies to be a valid form of democracy, liberals take this disingenuously as if Marxists hate all democracy.