Sue,
Yes it can change, the great thing with our country is the ability to make changes when needed. It isn't easy but there are things in the past which have changed that people said was impossible to do so.
For the record, I would recommend reading the constitution and the federalist papers. There are a few books on the people who founded the country that are good reads.
So how can we change things?
Let's start with a few things that need to be changed FIRST.
The first problem is how we view our government and our rights. We have the original system of governence setup to have the rights come from God to the people, from the people to the states and from the states to the federal government. As I said in a limited form in another post that this started with Lincoln's style of federalism and expanded since his death to the point that once we were supposed to have a that rights chain to be absolute to the form we have now. What we had in a form of dual federalism (meaning states and federal government being equal) is gone since Lincoln. The one person who actually started a lot of the modernization of our country towards socialism is Teddy Roosevelt. Maybe no other person can match the fundamental changes we were forced to deal with.
The second problem and it is related to the first is the idea that we need direct representation in both chambers of congress. The original system was setup so the senator represented the states, and the states were free to elect or choose their representative as they see fit. The reason for this is the attitude say Pennsylvania has is not the same as South Carolina and PA may choose to pick a very conservative business man (not politically conservative) while SC would pick a plantation owner to represent their needs. THIS all changed with the 17th amendment where we directly elected our senators and the state's representation went away with it, and it also vacated a lot of the 10th amendment and the checks the system had for the states.
The third thing is the federal government is not anyone's fault but our own. With the influx of immigrants in the last two centuries, we have been diluting a lot of our culture (it is a good thing by the way) and moving away from isolation. This has brought ideas to us from the rest of the world, one example I wrote about was the revolutions of the 1840s and how we were effected by them because those who came here were those who wanted change there. So we have to have a cultural change within the country and can have that if we want it - maybe having a really hard economic fall will provide us with that push.
All the other things people are talking about won't fix the problems but it will help later on.
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