Getting the form of government right........

.........................has, historically, always been a difficult task:

      The Massachusetts convention convened in Boston in January 1788.  Theophilus Parsons was a delegate and a staunch Federalist, as the pro-Constitution faction called itself.  So was John Adams, for the Constitution contained the strong executive he had argued for, as well as an upper house of the legislative branch - the Senate - which would, like the House of Lords, operate as a check on the more rash and populist lower chamber.  John Quincy Adams, for all his father's influence and his years spent in the courts of Europe, worried that a powerful national government would infringe on the rights of the people.  At Harvard, he had always taken the republican side of the debate over the proposed constitution against his aristocratic classmates.  Adams was not a democrat, he had little faith in the wisdom of majorities, and he still abhorred the mob.  But he feared the rise of an English-style hereditary ruling class.  "No branch will represent the people," he wrote to Billy Cranch.  Both houses of Congress, he thought, would represent the interests of the rich.  This principled insistence on the distinction between the interests of the whole people and those of one's own faction prefigured Adams' break with the Federalists twenty years later.

-James Traub, John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit


Some two hundred plus years later, we tend to forget that the framers of the Constitution were trying out a radical enterprise, an experiment in government, if you will.  Whether you call it a representative democracy, a constitutional democracy,  a republic, or something else, it is important to note that the experiment continues - and the outcome is far from certain.