I do not welcome the last, greatest evidence of the failure of Democracy to the selfishness, ignorance, and vice of the masses.

I know this is going to sound like a broken record thing that people have nitpicked over centuries and sounds like silliness every time you hear it, but I have a clear reason for making the nitpick for my argument. We are not in a democracy, we are in a representative republic. In a democracy everyone has a vote on every issue, in a representative republic you elect representatives to vote on issues for you.

The main issues with our country are actually failures to adapt to this proper representation as the federal government has increased in power and the population has increased dramatically. Many say that the solution to this is to reduce the power of the federal government, but that's not exactly an easy task sometimes (even if it's a good goal). An easier task is to increase the representation of the people.

We currently have a population of 323.7 million people in the United States. When the country did its first census in 1790, we had a population of roughly 3.9 million people.

We currently have 537 elected representatives in the federal government (435 House, 100 Senate, 1 President, 1 Vice President). In 1790 we had 13 states, and 95 representatives in the federal government (67 House, 26 Senate, 1 President, 1 Vice President). Appointments by elected officials don't really count in my mind since you elected the people who did the appointing, and had no real say in the matter.

(please fact check these numbers, some of them were a little hard to get accurate on)

So this means that in 1790 we had a ratio of 24.36 representatives per million people. This number actually kind of surprised me since I guess I didn't realize we already had 3.9 million people around by 1790.

Anyway, in 2016 we have 1.687 representatives per million people. It's 14.43 times less representation than we originally had.

Compare that to the monarchy, where one non-elected person was representing at 0.2564 per million people. We are rapidly approaching the level of representation of the original monarchy that our country revolted against in the first place, so expect political dissatisfaction and civil unrest to rise as people feel the system is "rigged" when in reality it just hasn't adjusted appropriately to our increasing population.

Honestly I don't really know how we could have ever thought we could be adequately represented by our governmental structure, but these representative ratios have plummeted quite rapidly over the years and fixing those ratios could make a significant impact.