It’s hardly surprising that we haven’t yet perfected our system of government. Societies have been practicing democracy for a very short time relative to human history, and we’re still working out the bugs and persuading ourselves to commit to the difficulties. And democracy is still a terrifyingly radical idea — as much as we rhapsodize about government by the people, we are afraid to trust ourselves and much more afraid to trust anyone else.

Moreover, democracy was never supposed to be a perfect clockwork mechanism, functioning on its own while citizens went about their lives, mitigating with preternatural precision every failure of human nature. Democracy is about people actively engaging with the decisions of their government at every level. It requires creating the space and processes for that to happen, providing education to enable an informed citizenry and putting in place safeguards to prevent oppression by the majority — and then continuously improving and adjusting those components as society changes.

In our technology-rich world, with a surplus of wealth and leisure time, we should have more opportunities to facilitate and extend democracy than ever before. And we do. Municipalities across the United States and countries around the world are experimenting with different types of democracy, leveraging digital and nondigital innovations to better involve citizens. Some countries have mandatory voting; some have instituted e-voting. Some localities within the United States are experimenting with ranked-choice voting or quadratic voting. Some countries are expanding the potential of direct democracy, in which people vote on policies or laws rather than on representatives; some are looking for ways to engage people beyond voting, into broader engagement in governance and community. There are myriad ways that we can make our system more representative, more accountable, more reflective of what people want.

And yet most of the discourse in the United States treats democracy as a done deal, an achievement to trumpet and spread around the world, an enviable and unchangeable status quo. There’s an immense kind of hubris in the suggestion that the way we do democracy is the end-all and be-all of governance, and that if it doesn’t work it must be democracy’s fault rather than our own.

It’s telling that many of the arguments about the end of democracy suggest it’s because we’ve given too much power to the masses, that we’ve become too democratic. A paper by Shawn Rosenberg, professor of political science and psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, claims that the problem is social media and that other technologies have disrupted the role of elites in guiding the masses through the intricacies of policy and economics. Other commenters suggest that the abysmal state of political literacy in the United States means the people can’t be trusted to make decisions about their government.