The elected representatives also need the power/will to change things, which has unfortunately not been the case in my voting lifetime.
The King of England is technically the king on paper, but has 0.5% of the power Henry VIII had. President Biden has 1% of the power FDR had.
A lot of things, in the US at least, are more and more dictated by unelected (and unfirable) bureaucrats in agencies.
If you look at history, that's a very old pattern. Ancient China, Rome, pre-Revolutionary France - you name it.
The population needed to feel that western society was superior to the communist alternative hypothesis in order to keep communism from getting a serious foothold in the west. Things didn't need to be perfect, but they needed to be much better than on the other side of the wall.
That tension was very much load-bearing to the western democracy and with the gradual breakdown of the Soviet union in the late '80s, something just snapped.