I’m sorry to belabor the point, but the US fails wildly on this metric as well. Voter suppression, gerrymandering and other anti-democratic tactics are widespread, the two party systems limits democratic choice to very narrow, right-leaning bounds, far less than that available in other representative democracies. Protests from the left are almost uniformly met with violence. By what measure in the US is one allowed to “achieve equality”? Even if we consider the advancement of civil rights, the average material conditions for the poor and most minority groups have been on the decline for decades. Likewise, the number of incarcerated people in the US far surpasses explicitly authoritarian regimes like China.