Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take an inspiration from countries that get proper democracy right - like Switzerland. You can have public vote on anything, just gather enough signatures and it will happen. Result will be binding to government, whatever it means. This of course relies on population to be at least slightly smart and not dumb herd of easy to manipulate sheeps, but that's a basic premise of democracy in general.
Direct democracy always beats representative democracy. In the representative democracy, people have not voted for the content of the laws that the law makers pass. That's why Rousseau calls "representative democracy" slavery. Direct democracy can work in small countries. Will it work in a country with 150M or 300M people? Will it work? Maybe, one has to schedule voting every 6 months, just like a train schedule.
I don’t see us anywhere near a failed experiment and until anyone can make that case strongly, changing our fundamental structure is off the table. 3rd highest GDP per capita, most innovative country by far, extremely high tourism rate, most diverse country in multiple ways, consistently expanding healthcare / best cancer treatment the world / most innovative drug research, hugely successful progressive social movements, most philanthropic, cities that give the highest amounts of social welfare in per capita terms, you can go on.
Of course you can point out many bad things, but that doesn’t invalidate that it’s not failing, just that it’s not perfect - and to be honest, much of the failures to me look like local ones, not Federal ones. Take Chicago for example.
We need diversity of governance so we can find out what rule of law works best in the long run. Let Europe experiment with more direct democracy. Look at Singapore, Rwanda for the other side. Let the experiments run so long as they don’t trample on basic human rights. America is flawed, but for the same reason Google Chrome shouldn’t win out the browser wars, Representative Democracy should stay, it matches up well on the stats I care about, and it tends not to trample on freedoms nearly as much (something something three lions and a zebra).