It's definitely not a dictatorship, it's something a lot more insidious. It's a self-sustaining informal plutocracy that masquerades as a paragon of democracy.
I don't understand how people still believe the US is an exceptionally democratic country even after learning about how democracy is implemented here. The whole thing with Electoral College and two-party system is just the tip of the iceberg. For me, it was the revelation about the existence of riders [0] that was the final nail in the coffin of my belief in democracy.