Yeah, he argued to use the visibility of liberal "democracy" to highlight its flaws and push socialist ideas onto the people, while recognising how useless it is for reforming our way into socialism. At least that's how I understand it, he wasn't saying it was completely useless and we should abandon it entirely, but use it as a source of free publicity basically, talk about it and how it won't provide for the people, use it to agitate and educate.

Understand the system and the walls put in place to prevent socialists from gaining power within it, so we can use it to our advantage instead, like everything else, the bourgeois won't play by their own rules, so we shouldn't either, we should use every advantage that we can get, because we'll need it in order to overthrow capital. What we need to is what gets us a successful revolution, not what feels good or allows us to have intact ideals.

I could be wrong though, sometimes I find Lenin so easy to understand (in the broad strokes at least) that I think I might be getting it wrong, because it seems so obvious that I can't understand how there's so much room for argument about what he "really meant".

In all fairness, he wasnt talking about contemporary America.