Actually the whole of left-wing ideologies is based on the concept of fighting human hierarchies i.e. it literally predisposes the existence of an elite class. Capitalism/Socialism is only a subset of that. I’m not sure how you can be a human adult (?) with and kind of lived experience and claim that it all boils down to the economic system. Have you never interacted with other humans irl?

Can we agree that so far humanity has not manage to create an anti-fragile governing system? We engineer ever more complex governing systems, but humans keep figuring out ways to corrupt them. I cannot envision a system that would be anti-fragile, hence the need for periodic resets. Even my local council ruling over a village of a couple of thousand souls has been embroiled in corruption scandals.

Going back to the original topic, I don’t think it is the priority of the electorate to change the system. First they want to change the people in charge, which is a per-requisite to changing the system anyway.

With regards to the voting system, look at Germany. They have 6 parties and the AfD, but really only two choices. Having multiple parties doesn’t really make as much of a difference as you think it does. Political parties are formed from the same class of elites so they tend to converge on all political topics that matter. There is only divergence when you have another class of wanna-be elites trying to dethrone them. That would be the AfD or MAGA.

I think this is the crux of the problem: no matter the government and electoral system, you still end up with a government formed out of a narrow subset of the population, the elites of the day. This is inevitable because each political environment will select for some select few traits. And the only time you get disruption is when a new set of elites tries to dethrone them.

Now you can conjure some kind of system by which the government is explicitly not formed out of some elite class. Like worker councils or some such idea. However, you then run into a problems such as lack of continuity (governing terms being too short) and lack of expertise. There are also some advantages to having a government run by a (competent) elite class. So you see, it’s not so simple.

But overall the electorate feels excluded when you have a government that is run by people who are so alien to them and who are clearly completely disconnected from the everyday man. And unfortunately the only protest the electorate has is to vote for another set of wanna-be elites in the hope that the resulting political disruption will unset some of the most harmful of the current crop. It’s generally good when the elites are in-fighting.

It helped liberals pinkwash their crimes. Reminds me of that meme of the B-54 on a bombing raid with the pride flag on its side.

Left/Right does it actually matter?

Whether you have a more capitalist or more socialist system, you will still have an establishment, an elite class*. People are disillusioned with that class of people and want to kick them out. If we had a more socialist system we could still be in this same situation, so what does it actually solve? People just want to hit the reset button every so often when the elite become too greedy. That’s really all there is to it.

*Spare me your anarchist fantasies.