It’s imaginary in the sense that no matter who wins an election, you’re going to end up with substantially the same government every time. If you’re so concerned with political tribalism that you can’t see how utterly corrupt your own team is, then you’ve simply fallen for the distraction.

In some ways yes, in other ways no. If Hillary had won in 2016 the USA would still be a capitalist dystopia, but it would be a capitalist dystopia where women and transgender people had rights, and inflation would be slightly lower as most capitalists aren't as brazen as Trump when he publicly threatened to fire the Fed chair if interest rates didn't come down. If Trump won in 2020 most of the bad political things happening in Florida would be happening to the whole country.

Besides, the Democrat party isn't left.

> where women and transgender people had rights,

What rights do these people not have that others do? Rights belong to all individuals.

> and inflation would be slightly lower as most capitalists aren't as brazen as Trump when he publicly threatened to fire the Fed chair if interest rates didn't come down. If Trump won in 2020 most of the bad political things happening in Florida would be happening to the whole country.

It's hard to say. Tump loved to sirens, and I am no fan of that, but inflation has been coming since Clinton left office. I find it unlikely that Hilary would have reduced the deficit, especially given the unconstitutional business closure orders that many states enacted, which PPP and enhanced unemployment sought to make condition via addressing 5A, but which utterly failed at doing so imo.

That's because government is a collection of institutions, the administration of the executive branch inherits them and has only limited ability to restructure them without legislative assistance (speaking about the US here, terms vary depending on the country and governance structure).

Are you saying the unelected bureaucracy is to blame? Because that's popular today too.

No. Bureaucracies are instituted by the legislative branch which chooses to delegate governmental powers (eg rulemaking) to them for the sake of efficiency, usually under the direct or indirect supervision of the executive branch. They don't spring into existence fully formed, and while professional bureaucrats certainly feather their nests and try to grow their empires, legislators are ultimately responsible. Many of them like using public institutions as straw opponents to impress the credulous.

Unelected bureaucracies absolutely dilute the efficiency of democracy, some times grinding it to an absolute halt. If this weren’t true then you’d never see disputes between bureaucrats and elected executives, but you do see that, all over the world. Some commonwealth countries have it even worse, where certain government institutions are accountable only to the king, rather than any elected executive authority.

Political thought is a high-dimensional space. Many of those are correlated along an axis that people call right/left. When someone says that right/left is imaginary, what they are often really saying is that they prioritize dimensions in that space that are not strongly correlated with the right/left axis.

Tribalism being what it is, people can mistake the forest for the trees and think that the convenient shorthand we have for a correlated set of values is more strongly defined (more “real”) than it actually is.