Well, you have to take into account that our current system in the united states is more concerned with consolidating the power the capitalist class, then anything else.

Like that's what it is, even Madison admitted this was one of the reason the constitution was drafted and I quote,

"Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority"

This is why Direct Democracy was mostly squashed after the revolution.

The whole Nation State is meant to protect private ownership of land and the modes of production. To stop, in other words, a system of communal ownership and communal benefits.

So the capitalist class, in the USA, has created a system with barriers to entry, namely the spectacle of the elections here.

There aren't free elections solely because it is dominated by two parties, right?

These parties then control all of political life because they have control over the elections. Meaning that there is no organic form of democracy, just a game the ruling class play every so many years to fool the masses into thinking their power is legitimized.

Well, that and they have the might of the most powerful military in the world, which the capitalist class uses to conquer foreign markets that won't sell them natural resources.

This planets a mess man.