I think you're loading 'democracy' up with some extra values there that aren't really part of the definition. Democracy just means governed by the people. It doesn't mean liberal, or enlightened, or progressive, or open to visitors, or anything like that. Just governed by the people. The people can be left wing or right wing, progressive or regressive, whatever.
Yes. Not every form of democracy is a liberal democracy. In a liberal democracy, some entity such as the judicial system is supposed to prevent the rest of government from tyrannizing minorities.
Democracy protects the majority from a minority (ie: nobility). Liberalism protects minorities (eg: people an with unpopular philosophy, religious view, ethnicity, language) from the majority.
This again depends on a definition of "liberalism" accepted by all, but I find the term "illiberal" or "non-liberal democracy" (i.e. the opposite of a liberal democracy) to be very difficult to interpret. Is it a democracy in which people have the right to vote, but their liberties are not protected by the law? But- the right to vote is a liberty. And then again, how come people voted to have their liberties not protected by law? What are they, idiots?
In any case, I can't really recall any state etc that has gone down in history as being an "illiberal democracy"!
Don't try and parse the term literally, the term is a contradiction - there's no such thing as an "illiberal democracy" for the reasons you specify. People who use that word simply mean "democracies where my personal views on things like immigration don't win".
The term illiberal democracy is an especially empty one because more or less any decision can be phrased in terms of positive liberties - e.g. "restrictions on immigration preserve the liberty of voters to enjoy and propagate their own culture".
Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? Accounts aren't allowed to use this site primarily for that, and this looks like exactly what yours has been doing.
Also, your first paragraph breaks the site guidelines pretty blatantly in other ways. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended from now on, we'd appreciate it.
Wikipedia: "Liberal democracy is a liberal political ideology and a form of government in which representative democracy operates under the principles of classical liberalism. Also called western democracy, it is characterised by elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, and the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and political freedoms for all people."
I promise you, I'm not in league with Wikipedia editors to make this stuff up. It is literally textbook.
