"No longer"? When were they accountable to the public? To public opinion, sure, but we still have opinion polls and politicians in most Western countries spend a lot of money on trying to shape that. But accountability is incompatible with centralization and multiple layers of delegation.

There's also the rather obvious conflict of interest between politicians needing/wanting money and politicians being supposed to represent the will of the people (rather than the will of those who can give them a lot of money). That police officers aren't being bribed doesn't mean we don't have corruption. We just have corruption with Western characteristics.

That's only because the public keeps re-electing them and their parties regardless of what they do. It's the voters who are not holding politicians accountable.

And that's only because for-profit media outlets owned by the bourgeoisie control the “narrative” and have huge power to influence people's electoral decisions.

Regardless, writing X in a box every four years is hardly a “democracy”.

You can find causes for causes all the way back in the chain. But voters are human beings with independent agency to act according to their own wishes. They have the ability to break the chain of causation if they want. And they don't. So it's their fault.

It's the same way that you can't say a child abuser isn't responsible for his crimes because he was abused himself as a child. Yes, that's a factor that contributed to his actions, but he's still responsible for his own actions no matter how difficult the decision is.

Yes, voting every 4 years is a democracy. It might not be direct democracy but direct democracy has serious problems and you probably wouldn't want it.

Current days political campaigning is pure emotional control. And its in a runaway effect state.

Politicians, backed by professional PR companies who in turn are based on sociology/psychology and years of studies, can pull on emotional strings of people who are already self identify into entrenched positions. Using emotions is clearly easier and more powerful way of getting votes. The only way to win is to play their game, and that costs a lot of money.

Its a fools game to try convince anyone with facts, it simply doesn't work. Thats why anti vaccines, flat earth etc are so rampant today. The more you reason with those type of people the more you entrench them.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted because that’s exactly what they’re doing. I worked for a company that was being paid to work out how best to manipulate people into certain political outcomes by trying things and measuring results. Of course they didn’t market themselves as that. I quit when I worked out what they were doing.

Interested in hearing more about your story if you're willing to share.

I’d probably get fucked over if I mention names which would be required. Not very nice people.

"trying things and measuring results"

do you mean plain jane A/B testing?

Nope much more insidious. A/B testing is statistically random. This thing dangled the desirable result down a path of rewards to attempt to reprogram people into accepting version A while discarding version B, then measuring which method to do so was more effective.