They asked why it was set up that way. I explained why it was set up that way.

Democracy, as an institution, was insurgent within the colonies long before the American Revolution. Early local settler colonial governments preferred democratic governance over authoritarian rule because there was no clear overwhelming political force to exert this kind of control. Later efforts to consolidate power nationally failed for similar reasons - the territory was too large and too sparsely populated to be dominated from a distant capital, market economies followed organic and cyclical patterns that defied strict authoritarian policies, and the culturally diverse public reflexively rebelled when any single minority faction gained too much power.

Popular demagogues, divorced from the centers of intellectual orthodoxy and economic command, could still sway their peers and influence the Lockean social contract more easily than autocrats issuing dictates from a capital.

Democracy isn’t something a handful of intellectuals created from whole cloth. It is a mass movement that those intellectuals sought to steer through formal institutionalization.