Democracy, as practised by the typical Western-world examples, is fundamentally flawed. Despite the fact that we have universal sufferage and regular elections, the average person feels so far disconnected from the actual governing process that we've begun to treat "the government" as an entity in and of itself, rather than an entity of, by, and for the people.
Governments seem to feel the same way about themselves...that they're some kind of divinely-created institution whose voter mandate gives them free reign to act. As long as governments think of themselves as "the government," rather than a group of individual citizens tasked with the responsibility of governing, I don't think anything will change.
I think representative democracy can work for small populations, but not to the extent that it's being used now. Things will only get worse as populations continue to rise.
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