"Democracy", Winston Churchill famously said, "is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." He didn't claim to have originated it, though, and actually, to give more context, he was speaking in the House of Commons on 11th November 1947 when he said:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

If, like me, you know next to nothing about political theory, and a rather limited amount about American history, then I can recommend Noēma magazine's America at 250 & Beyond, by Nathan Gardels and Nicholas Bergruen.

It's a long, but very readable, piece, explaining how the American political model arose largely from the Founding Fathers' suspicions about democracy. Churchill was in good company.

James Madison, the fourth U.S. president [...] famously declared: "Democracy is the most vile form of government … democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." John Adams, the second American president, wrote: "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

So they put in place various measures to deal with the problems democracy had exhibited up to that point, especially in the Roman Republic. The article then goes on to discuss whether these safety measures continue to be successful and appropriate, in the modern world. Government by the people has many problems, for example:

The public is not stupid. But busy with work, life and family, it is, by and large, ill-informed. 

One of the advantages of having 50 States with a reasonable amount of independence over their local politics is that some of them can work as petri-dish experiments for systems that might be adopted more widely. At the start of the 20th century, it was Wisconsin:

Theodore Roosevelt remarked that Wisconsin had become “literally a laboratory for wise, experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.”

The world became more complex as a result of the industrial revolution, and some of Wisconsin's lessons were adopted to help cope with it.

In the 21st century, that laboratory role is perhaps chiefly being performed by California. Might experiments being tried there help fix America's current challenges with democracy?