"America hasn’t had a functional democracy for quite some time"

It never did. It was never planned that way or conceived that way. The conscious and deliberate model for American government has always been the Roman Republic's Senate--a collegium of rich, slave-owning landholders only united in a desire to prevent any one of their own from becoming King, presiding over a large and troublesome population of plebes. By 18th century standards, this arrangement was certainly the progressive alternative to Divine Right of Kings and a hereditary aristocracy, but it had nothing to do with Athenian Democracy. These men could read Ancient Greek, and they wanted no part of that.

As for your interpretation of the two-party State, that also can be traced back to colonial times. The urbanized, commercial North, and the feudal, rural South. The issues may have changed, but their geographical and demographic divisions still echo the 18th century. Nixon's Southern Strategy merely restored the balance, it did not upset it.

Our founders may have been commoners, members of the new aristocracy of Property, but they were intelligent and capable men, highly educated intellectuals, but also men of action--business, politics, war. They were resigned to sharing power, but only with their peers. They feared the rabble even more than they feared the nobility--or their slaves.

Everywhere in the original Constitution we see the scaffolding that ensures popular elections do not elect our leaders-what we call today "checks and balances". Only the House is elected by popular vote, and then only from a limited franchise, white Gentlemen of Property.

Over the centuries, this skeleton has been slowly and gradually democratized, but to this day it still survives in the Electoral College and bicameral legislature. The founders feared the tyranny of the majority because they were most decidedly a tiny minority. It is why they have always conceived of freedom as an individual achievement of the exceptional, not the inherent right of all in the community.