and the business->government pipeline when Eisenhower's advisors all used to work/currently work for The United Fruit Company
If we're considering corporations to be "undemocratic, authoritarian, central-planning (...) communist dictatorships" inside, then so are all democratic governments. The "voice of the people" part of a democratic government is just a surface layer, the tip of an iceberg. Or, more charitably, a rudder of a ship - the part that sets the course, but is nevertheless insignificant in mass compared to the rest of the ship.
The bulk of every government is a top-down hierarchical structure, because it can't really be any other way. You can't hold votes on whether a particular clerk is supposed to be in a particular building on Monday 09:00, and whether they're supposed to approve the form you're trying to submit.
In a representative democracy you get a voice on who executes the orders regardless of whether you are rich or poor or smart or stupid or went to business school with who-knows-who.
If we were in Plato's perfect Republic where all the uninitiated adults were purged from the polis and there were only citizens trained since childhood to seriously consider matters of state, now we'd be in the same sport, if not ballpark.
How would you feel if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission soft-balled Mr. Burns, then one of its commissioners jumped ship to work at Springfield Nuclear?
Even if that commissioner was an enlightened patrician of high moral character, it would create the appearance of corruption. And that alone is corrosive to the rule of law.
People with less integrity, people downstream in industry, might interpret that as a signal that regulators are a joke. They may go on television and say things like "I don't respect the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
The bigger problem is the reverse; we should really have the government do something like finance's "garden leave", where leaving employees are paid while banned from industry employment, so that whatever competitive info you had is outdated by the time you can take a job in industry again.
If I'm from New Hampshire, Ohio, Maine, South Dakota or somewhere else government is still kinda sorta accountable I'm Outraged(TM).
If I'm from Massachusetts, Louisiana, California, New York, or somewhere else government has been unaccountable for generations I shrug and move on with life.