Democracy becomes impossible is a real threat but it's again not something that affects the average person day-to-day until shit hits the fan and it's too late.

Again, follow the incentives, the behavior, and the motivations of the average person.

In "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", Zhuboff poses that shame in a neoliberal society becomes tied to individual failure, such as failure to succeed. You feel shame for your shortcomings and not working hard enough, rather than for some mortal virtue you failed to uphold. Psychopolitics by Han-Byul also goes into this, kind of how the market managed to convince the individual to enslave themselves and set their own requirements for themselves without a king or master to order this.

In such a society, shame cannot be ascribed to doing something monetarily rational. It's not immoral to better yourself in any way. If you need to cheat to steal the election, so be it, you're just hustling and are clearly smarter than your opponent, so you deserve it.

I think a bit of the tragedy in this is that this stacks the incentives against morally right things in the long run. It was often better for resource accumulation to do the morally bad thing, and your counterweight would be shame from society, but now it's gone and the people who choose the (now much more accessible) morally corrupt path with run away with capital, power and social status. It's IMO a really good time in history to be a piece of shit as an average person