It was designed from the outset, very explicitly by our Founding Fathers, to be only just-so democratic so that certain prevailing interests could be secure. At the outset those included the slaveholding interests of the South. But even after the Civil War, the structures put into the Constitution to protect them (and make no mistake, the Constitution was structured to protect those interests) still protected the losers of the Civil War, who were mostly given a pass for their insurrection in the interest of "healing the nation."
Direct democracy was not possible with the technology of the 1700's, but something a lot better than the Senate clusterfuck we live with today surely was. Our current problem is, as bad as the crapfest they saddled us with is, they recognized probably correctly that something even worse would emerge in any partisan environment that was likely to emerge in the years after 1790. So they made it very difficult to change the Constitution. Which is either great wisdom or a tragedy depending on how you look at it. We are basically running Democracy 0.9 unpatched in a world where 3.x is the norm, and updates are disabled.
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