I think we have a long history of assigning agency where it isn't, and not demanding it when we should. The closest category I can think we have is a direct democracy. Unfortunately, we believe we are in a republic because the law describes a system of public cooperative management among informed citizens who vote every 4 years for someone they hope won't murder their children in an unnecessary war. In the back alleys and open markets, however, we vote billions of times every day for the faceless corruptors who pay those politicians to do just that.

The best part is that consumers vote for products without any idea of the overhead costs at their decision point. Deaths, pollution, wars and bureaucracy costs are all taken from us "somewhere else", and keep the blind faith that "someone would do something if it was bad for us".

Another analogy might be a sports tournament, where everyone pays to play, to watch, and to eat, but even the final standing team isn't the winner: the concession contractor just picks two teams with the best marketing chant and everyone gets drunk, flips a coin and voila! It's a new baby presidential party, ready for advertisers to trade barbs over and ring the Pavlov bell for car dealers and breweries to start writing checks to TV producers.

Fanatical competition over competing fanaticisms, and a continuous Loser Production process (fewer and fewer winners, more and more losers) that runs on cheap food from cheap oil.

Our perpetual war on Nature has always been in the background, but it will become a war of attrition soon enough, and it won't matter what form of government is wagged by it.