For a long time, I thought the Democrats were fighting valiantly but just overwhelmed by the oligarchy and the Republicans. Then I saw that the Democrats keep losing fights they should win and figured they must be just weak and ineffectual. Then I kept seeing them backing off without putting up a fight at all and decided they were gutless cowards. Finally I noticed that enough of them keep voting with the Republicans to always make sure the Republicans more or less win almost every fight, and that they keep starting from a Center position and bargaining to the Right, and eventually after enough of that it became impossible to ignore the only conclusion that actually fits the facts: The Democrats are not over matched, they aren’t weak, they aren’t cowards…they’re complicit.
Sorry for the self plug, but I recently wrote a blog post where I tried to design a government structure that was aimed at exactly that: https://arendjr.nl/blog/2025/02/new-monarchy/
The core idea is a split being the ruling class, who will have wealth but are disallowed personal property, and a citizen class that can dispose rulers but cannot put themselves up for election to prevent them from gaming the system.
Of course I cannot prove it’s actually better than current democracy, and I sure as hell wouldn’t suggest implementing without at least some more revisions from people with more political experience than me, but hey, maybe it provides some good ideas for a better structure.