I suspect that is why we are a republic, and the difference is important in the sense that individual states have some measure of protection from “great masses of plain people in other” states.
yes indeed. our founding fathers were pretty well read in the history of Greece, Rome, and England and political “science” generally, and they worked hard to avoid turning USA into a “democracy”
1. state appointment of US senators to avoid direct popular vote for them
2. leaving in place state election laws, some of which required land.business ownership (a stake in the society, so to speak)
3. electoral college to avoid direct popular vote for Prez
4. splitting up and balance of federal powers into 3 distinct branches (unlike the British system of more unified control)
5. very limited federal govt powers (only 18 powers with every other possible power “reserved to the states, or to the people”
and more.
of course, much of the above protections against direct populist democracy have been abandoned.
As Benjamin Franklin famously answered when asked what kind of government the founders gave USA, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
As Aristotle observed some 2500 years ago,
” Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.”