As someone once said, if aliens came down to earth, they would think cattle were the dominant species, given the amount of resources devoted to them. It isn't a matter of quantity, but the focus/quality.

Consider that Russia and China are effectively evolving back to private forms of government, with Putin and Xi, in order to control the essential rapaciousness of the oligarchs.

It seems pretty obvious the business interests and banking are the dominant force in this country. That's why some senile old grifter is all that's necessary to fill the top spot.

Government serves to keep the people under control otherwise.

Consider that when Reagan tried cutting welfare in 86, the main lobbyist that convinced him not to, was Archer Daniels Midland, the agribusiness conglomerate. That's because it uses public debt to pay corporations to feed poor people, rather than finding ways to productively involve them back into society and the economy. Then the banks can use the debt to back more notational assets.

Michael Hudson wrote a good book some years ago, called, Forgive Them Their Debts. About how this played out in the Ancient world, between the political system having to hold society together, while those with the wealth and power leveraging ever more wealth and power out of the overall society, leaving it otherwise unable to function. Consequently debt jubilees became a necessary circuit breaker for this feedback loop.

Here we are 3000 years later, still stuck in the same rut. We might have developed technologically, but our social knowledge hasn't progressed all that much.

I'm not a fan of big government, but we have a society that treats people as interchangeable units, rather than promoting deeper social cohesion, so as these pods, we are that much more dependent on those larger structural forces and insititutions to provide the larger networking, rather than it evolve organically.