Are they? Corporate shareholders have power of on-demand accountability and enough competency to grasp the goings on of a board meeting, that is not what a rand

Are they? Corporate shareholders have power of on-demand accountability and enough competency to grasp the goings on of a board meeting, that is not what a random _demos_ in a representative democracy is composed of and it changes the whole game, that's not a minor detail. Even besides the competency/knowledge problem, American citizens cannot, amongst themselves, zero external mediation, vote an elected official out of office as far as I'm aware. If we were in Plato's perfect Republic where all the uninitiated adults were purged from the polis and there were only citizens trained since childhood to seriously consider matters of state, now we'd be in the same sport, if not ballpark.