I bet if you polled current COLLEGE students maybe 20% would know that the U.S.A. is a representative republic and not a democracy.
I suspect this whole tangent is going to end up in quarantine, but the US is a representative democratic republic. In a republic, the government is supposed to exist for the benefit of the people (though there are a lot of countries that have called themselves republics that fell short of that). In a representative democracy the people elect people to represent them and make laws. If the country is a republic too, those laws are supposed to benefit all people.
Before the first supreme court ruling about corporations being people, corporations had to prove that their existence benefited society in some way or they could be dissolved. Being a democratic republic, the majority is supposed to have a say in what happens, but they should work within a framework that gives and protects rights for all so the minority is not unduly harmed by the majority.
The compromises in the constitution that gives minority groups more power were compromises to get to the end document. The different regional cultures in the US have different motivations and different goals and they have been at odds with one another since colonial times.
When the country was founded the urban/rural split was very different from today. The urban/suburban population was about 5% of the country and it's more than 80% today. Over the last 10 years the parts of the country that grew are the urban and suburban areas and the rural areas all shrank. The census results were very clear.
When the rural population really was the majority everywhere, the constitutional provisions like the 2 senators for every state just gave the smaller rural states a bit more say vs the rural large states. But the differences between the smallest and largest states was nowhere near as large as today. In 1790 the ratio was about 12.5:1 between Virginia and Delaware. Today it's 68:1 and the larger states are much more urbanized than the smallest states. The drafters of the constitution assumed that any state that got too big would be broken into multiple states, and some states were split.
Because of the 3/5ths rule the South had more power before the Civil War and when they disenfranchised the African Americans after the war they had even more power because the non-voting black population was counted as full individuals.
Now that disproportionate power has shifted from the white South to all rural states dominating the more urban states via their influence in the Senate.
Equal protection for all is a very good thing and should be at the foundation of any healthy republic, but any form of democracy should have majority rule or the system begins to break down as it's doing now. Minority rule eats at the fabric of society and unravels it over time.