Civil rights is orthogonal to democracy. Creating a democratic country like the U.S. is the real achievement. Most countries never come close to accomplishing that.
Fun fact: The US isn't counted as a "Full Democracy" by that index, so seems it's not as a great of an achievement as you seem to think. I'm looking forward to see how the ranking of the US changes in 2025, seems to be slipping downwards rather than upwards sadly.
> However, the political and structural problems that caused the US to be downgraded to a “flawed democracy” in 2016 (a downgrade that pre-dated the inauguration of Donald Trump as president in January 2017) persist. These include low levels of trust in political institutions and the media; institutional gridlock; excessive influence of lobbyists, interest groups and the mega-rich; sharp economic and social inequalities; and an absence of social consensus on core national values.
Just saying "USA is the most democratic country in the world" feels like worse than at least trying to look at things objectively.
And the lack of universal suffrage back in the day doesn’t diminish America’s achievement. India and Bangladesh and Iraq and many places have universal suffrage but they’re not as democratic as the U.S. was in 1789. Getting to that point is the 0 to 1 of democracy. Expanding the franchise from there is incremental development.
And yes, some of the rights are essential for democracy. There is a reason bill of rights was approved at the sunrise of our democracy.
That said:
* it existed in a historic and cultural context of states that had already made significant movements in that direction -- it was a big leap, but it wasn't simple 0-1. More like a 0.4 with a lot of the relevant ideals and institutions (elections, representation, courts, legislative bodies, executive authority, rule of law , etc) fairly well developed and demonstrated in various ways pulled together into a coherent 0.75 and woven in with enlightenment ideals as expressed in documents like the declaration of independence.
* There is at least a partial linear dependence between civil rights and democracy. The franchise relationship is where it's strongest. Democracy is effective, principled, & honored ballot access. Without any effective franchise what you have instead is an opinion poll. And mere fractional access to the franchise walks elections & representation down from "1" -- it is literally the coefficient you have to multiple a "1" democracy by in order to arrive at its effective democratic nature.
That's just the start, though. It's a bit like that old Churchill/Shaw/Twain/whoever story where Clever Guy™ is having a conversation with a woman:
“Would you sleep with a stranger if he paid you £1,000,000?”
“Yes.”
“And if he paid you £5?”
“£5? What do you think I am?”
“We’ve already established that, now we're just haggling over the price.”
This generalizes to other rights. In order to have them guaranteed to anyone, they must be guaranteed to everyone. It's why constitutional guarantees tend to be features of constitutional representative democracies since the enlightenment, imperfect leap though the US is.
The big question is if the US (among others) can finish climbing the ladder when the political headwinds seem to be against "guaranteed to everyone."
I don't think that inductive reasoning works. Every country excludes lots of people from the franchise. The U.S. has almost 100 million people who aren't eligible to vote, mostly young people and non-citizens. No country has a truly universal franchise. Under your reasoning, that's unstable--if we can take away the franchise from 17 year olds, we can take away the franchise from 18 year olds, etc.
Historically, the big democratic jumps were probably extending the franchise to prominent family heads voting, followed by landowning males.
Contrast that with sex, religion, ethnicity, origin, asset ownership etc and the real question is why anyone would accept that they're truly comparable.
Citizenship may be the only truly stickier corner case. Largely because international relations will sometimes produce reasons to limit it more tightly or extend it more freely by broad categories such as national origin. But even here (a) most countries recognize that is often only one of several important judgements in a wise process (b) it's possible to review the equitability of citizenship qualifications: can they be met by anyone by way of objective assessment of investment in society and respect for acceptable participation?