Democracy is not the issue, the large country is. USA is way too large for it's own good. So it Russia and China.
You hear about it talked about all the time with regards to large technology organizations. The supposed best ones have small, autonomous teams focused on their little slice of the organization, collaborating with other teams as need be while upper management aggregates the best ideas from all teams and presents those to the rest of the organization so that other team leads can decide on whether or not those ideas would work for them.
I believe the Federal branch of the government absolutely has a role to play in the success of our country, I just think we'd be better off if it was a much reduced role.