The founders did not want direct federal democracy, they new it would be chaos. POTUS was to be selected by electors who were landholders, those who had a stake in the state,.
Power structures, who makes decisions well no shit. Families have power structures and factions. Social peer groups. Unions. Religion. Hollywood. There is always politics.
Communism socialism, democracy, anarchism, libertarianism and all the other isms, power hierarchical structures will always form. The question is not that it will happen, the question is how to achieve a balance of power that minimizes abuse of power and chance for tyranny.
The American solution was three coequal branches of govt. POTUS veto power which can be over ridden by enough votes.
Regardless of yjr =ism the problem who makes decisions and how they are enforced. On the scale of the USA representative democracy is the practical solution. It would never work in China at the national level.
To restate yet gain, we are a democratic republic not a democracy where public majority vote rules on all issues.
Our economy is primarily run by supply and demand which generally sets wages and prices. There is no economic central planning and decisionmaking. We get what the majority of the people want to buy.
The critical requirement of a democracy is an educated citizenry and active participation in politics. We vote based on limited knowledge and go back to work and play complaining if we di not like something. For example climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
Democracy (Greek: δημοκρατία dēmokratía, literally "Rule by 'People'") is a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting. In a direct democracy, the citizens as a whole form a governing body and vote directly on each issue. In a representative democracy the citizens elect representatives from among themselves. These representatives meet to form a governing body, such as a legislature. In a constitutional democracy the powers of the majority are exercised within the framework of a representative democracy, but the constitution limits the majority and protects the minority, usually through the enjoyment by all of certain individual rights, e.g. freedom of speech, or freedom of association.[1][2] "Rule of the majority" is sometimes referred to as democracy.[3] Democracy is a system of processing conflicts in which outcomes depend on what participants do, but no single force controls what occurs and its outcomes.
The uncertainty of outcomes is inherent in democracy, which makes all forces struggle repeatedly for the realization of their interests, being the devolution of power from a group of people to a set of rules.[4] Western democracy, as distinct from that which existed in pre-modern societies, is generally considered to have originated in city-states such as Classical Athens and the Roman Republic, where various schemes and degrees of enfranchisement of the free male population were observed before the form disappeared in the West at the beginning of late antiquity. The English word dates back to the 16th century, from the older Middle French and Middle Latin equivalents.
According to American political scientist Larry Diamond, democracy consists of four key elements: a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; protection of the human rights of all citizens; a rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.[5] Todd Landman, nevertheless, draws our attention to the fact that democracy and human rights are two different concepts and that "there must be greater specificity in the conceptualisation and operationalization of democracy and human rights".[6]
The term appeared in the 5th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Athens, to mean "rule of the people", in contrast to aristocracy (ἀριστοκρατία, aristokratía), meaning "rule of an elite". While theoretically these definitions are in opposition, in practice the distinction has been blurred historically.[7] The political system of Classical Athens, for example, granted democratic citizenship to free men and excluded slaves and women from political participation. In virtually all democratic governments throughout ancient and modern history, democratic citizenship consisted of an elite class, until full enfranchisement was won for all adult citizens in most modern democracies through the suffrage movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Democracy contrasts with forms of government where power is either held by an individual, as in an absolute monarchy, or where power is held by a small number of individuals, as in an oligarchy. Nevertheless, these oppositions, inherited from Greek philosophy,[8] are now ambiguous because contemporary governments have mixed democratic, oligarchic and monarchic elements. Karl Popper defined democracy in contrast to dictatorship or tyranny, thus focusing on opportunities for the people to control their leaders and to oust them without the need for a revolution.[9]
