I am a bit lost on this thread. What I have learned is that democracy is a way to organize a government where each citizen has equal rights in the decision process to achieve common laws. This is a definition, not a value. The one value behind this definition is the idea that all people have the same rights and worth.
The whole idea behind a democracy is that THERE ARE NO UNIVERSAL VALUES. Rules of conduct are achieved by consensus. Every person can decide his own values (freedom for all?).
Normally the only groups that claim to represent universal values are religions (an exception are communist states, that is why they only have one party). Because of this in most (maybe all) democratic countries, state and church are seperate entities. If a religion wants to be involved in politics, they start an electable party.
Since power easily concentrates, there are some systems that most democracies use. One very important is the so called Trias Politicas, the seperation between legislative, executive and judicial powers. Try to put any two of those in the same hands and see how abuse becomes easy. For example in most democracies the judges are in a completely separate organisation, choosing it's own leaders etc.
Yeah, I sound like a teacher, sorry about that, there seemed to be some confusion. Serious question: Does this stuff get taught in high school in the US?
As to the "universal" values produced by democracy, the declaration of human rights has been signed by almost every nation. Since not all those nations are democratic ... the decision process is somewhat dubious. All the same most people seem to agree on most of them.
By the way, the US is not really a democracy, even according to the most open definition since in priciple a president can be elected with about 26% of national votes (and he is supposed to speak for all of them). Also I heard somewhere that in the US the president can appoint judges ...
Last point: Having every person vote on each law or even each decision may be ideal from a democratic standpoint, but is really too slow and askes too much effort understanding the issue for most people.