Whatever we were defending, it wasn't democracy.

Yeah, I know. I chalk it up to it having been an American writer. A goodly number of Americans don't actually seem to understand democracy, but rather use it as a sort of catch all for anything that seems more correct than whatever the other guys are doing, sort of the same way "patriotic" is bandied about as meaning rooting for us is more correct than, well, anything else. A more appropriate word might have been "humanity".