It's easy to see government as representative of the people when you live in a small country, or if you're thinking about your local government.
When a government has 300 million+ people to represent, it needs to have very limited responsibilities and powers, because the common interests of so many people are very limited.
That is (cargo culting political attitudes aside) largely why the American relationship with the federal government is "adversarial"- the larger it grows, the easier it is for special, non-representative interests to take advantage of.
There's a similar story played out among union participation here; the larger the union, the less individuals feel that it is working exclusively in their best interests. Likewise: approval for individual congressional representatives is typically high, but Congress itself invariably has very low approval ratings.