> self governance.
This is democracy. You cannot have self-governance without democracy. If not everyone is enfranchised, not everyone has self-governance. You can quibble about representative democracy, but it's still democracy at its core.
Now yes, as the other poster mentions, many of the tenets of the founders' approach to representative democracy were intended to limit political participation by people who were not white, male, and landowners. Thankfully, many of those policies [edit: have since been changed].
> The house of Representatives was the only democratically elected part of the government for a reason. We ignored them at our own peril..
Keep in mind that by the definition you're using here, there's a solid argument to make that neither the US senate nor the US presidential elections are "democratic" today due to the inherent undemocratic nature of the electoral college and differing vote values of residents of different states. So this is still the case, and perhaps you've misidentified the problem.
(I always wonder why we deify a bunch of mostly 30 year olds from 270 years ago as though they had the perfect ideas about government and we haven't learned anything in the intervening centuries)