No such thing as unfairly maligning a politician in my opinion.
The US is a country of 330M people, the world is a community of 8B people. If we want to be able to live side by side, we need rules and policies. It's always going to messy.
I would love it if in the next few decades we improve "the game" and figure out better ways to incentivise the players towards common good.
"The game" is brutal. The players only care for themselves. "The game" is as unfair as it gets. Most don't live side by side, they survive inspite of others. Competition is brutal. Got sick with cancer? Sorry, lose all "points". Want to buy X? Sorry, me (cancerless) will out bargain you.
How can we change it though? Looking at history, changes come through either (usually bloody) revolution, or through politics themselves.
So unfortunately, someone needs to play the game in order to change it.
I am not moralizing here, by the way. I am not claiming that corporations should be less sociopathic. Maybe they should be but we’ve had much better success in aligning sociopathy than in making the amoral, moral - see capitalism vs communism - so I think it’s an open question.
Another group of entities which, while comprised of people, does not act in the way you’ve come to understand a human to act is politicians. The incentives to act in whatever way that is most effective totally dominates their behavior. A politician who does not do what the job asks (amass political power) will not be a politician for long.
I think that's where we seem to differ? "Whatever is most effective"
I'll grant democracy as practiced has many side effects and incentive traps.
However, it also does generally align politician's goals with their voters, under threat of being kicked out of office.
I’m only saying that effectively sociopathic agents do not deserve the courtesies, the benefit of the doubt that we afford regular people.
I don't believe there are that many politicians who literally don't believe anything they support and are only doing it because they think it will win them elections.
Greater than zero, but less than most.
Most spend a non-trivial amount of time on electioneering, and a non-trivial amount of consideration on the re-electability impacts of a given decision, but also do things for a variety of other reasons (e.g. personal convictions, campaign promises, lobbying, etc).
See e.g. "Al Gore and the Internet" by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf https://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/...