Democracy is often confused with freedom even though it's easy to see that it isn't. If a group of people can force their will on others simply by being in the majority, clearly, we're not free. That being said, some types of democracy are worse than others. Direct democracy, limited to only those who pay taxes, is the best type of democracy, while unrestrained representative democracy is the worst.
A limited direct democracy will have a tendency to self correct. Bad laws that produce excesses of various kinds will be withdrawn because the electorate finds them too costly to uphold. However, in a unrestrained representative democracy, this kind of feedback is slow to kick in, and may not kick in at all, because the ones in majority are not necessarily the ones carrying the costs, nor are they in direct control of the laws.
This distinction in outcome can be seen today by comparing the US with Switzerland. Both are democratic. However, Switzerland has direct democracy that allows for changes to all laws, including the constitution. This results in a lot of experimentation, and many bad laws get passed. However, they are usually rolled back relatively soon. Once the public see the damage that bad laws produce, they tend to vote them out.
By contrast, the US has representative democracy. People don't vote for the laws. They choose people to do this for them. What's debated in the US is not so much the laws themselves as the people enacting them. Bad laws can therefore be enacted and never removed, especially laws that favour the representatives themselves. No matter how many new representatives the people elect to make a change to such laws, representatives will hesitate to change them once elected. Furthermore, representatives soon discover the benefits of power, and are prone to corruption. Laws that benefit large corporations will therefore stick in the same way that laws benefiting representatives stick.
The hierarchy of power implicit in the representative system makes it lopsided and unstable. Representatives and their corporate backers will expand their power at the expense of the people, and the constitution is no safeguard against this, because it's merely a hurdle that the representatives will work actively to subvert. The language of the constitution will be subverted, and every little detail will be construed to mean more power to government. Lately, "We the people" has been used by US presidents to mean "We in power", i.e. government.
What's happening in the US is nothing that couldn't have been foreseen at the very start of the republic. It was naïve to think that the electorate would be able to counter the relentless corruption that would come from Washington. Representative democracy is a feudal system, complete with reeves in the form of representatives, and overlords in the form of corporate backers. Feudalism and serfdom is therefore the natural end station of this experiment, and by the look of it, we're already there.
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