The political power wielded by the voting public is limited at best. I think other comrades have already gone into the parliamentary aspect but there are others.

There is no democracy of any kind in the economic sphere. Even though politics and economics are permanently intertwined, liberal democracies forcibly separate them and allow for no democratic oversight of the economy. We cannot as the people of any given liberal nation choose our economic priorities let alone the paradigm and system itself. Economic decision making is left to capitalists, academics, and central bankers.

Since I mentioned academics, academia itself is a control institution for liberal democracy. Since most academics live off study grants and publications, they have to do what capital wants them to. So they study and teach things capital likes and most anyone who thinks differently gets removed somehow.

A government is made up of more than just a parliament as well. Bureaucrats do the day to day work of executing the parliament’s laws. An extreme example of this is the German “Beamte”. This person is unfireable, does not pay into social security systems, and is allowed to interpret the laws they are tasked with executing with a great degree of freedom. This system was designed from the beginning to act as a check on the power of the legislature.

Then we have law enforcement. Cops are a cult, judges can be bought (and also came of age in the selective halls of academia), special law enforcement units like ICE or Frontex ensure there is a fearful and oppressed underclass desperate for any job at any conditions.

Spy agencies like the CIA may function as shadow governments, if the Deep State or Tripartite State theory (C. W. Mills, P. D. Scott, A. Good) is to be believed, which I think it is. They execute actions in the interest of specific factions of the capitalist class, at home (where they are on paper prohibited from operating) and abroad. When a given politician is too close to giving up the game or giving the working people more than the crumbs the capitalists are willing to give us, they step in and “fix” the situation. But that’s only rarely necessary given all the earlier control mechanisms.

A dishonourable mention to think tanks and civil society foundations and NGOs for (to paraphrase) doing the CIA’s dirty work out in the open.

Edit: how could I forget media! To be brief I’ll also quote Lenin:

For the bourgeoisie, freedom of the press meant freedom for the rich to publish and for the capitalists to control the newspapers, a practice which in all countries, including even the freest, produced a corrupt press.

I just learned yesterday that the AP cooperated with Nazi censorship requests (and probably self-censored to avoid more requests) back in those times.

We’re building those! (/s) They’re being called Abschiebezentren (deportation centers)…

I’ve yet to see a convincing distinction between fascism and neoliberalism. I also think part of the reasoning behind portraying fascism as primarily an ideology of xenophobic hatred and the result of one great-angry-populist-man is to obscure the economic and class basis of the ideology, because if we were taught the economic fundamentals of both fascism and neoliberalism we’d end up realizing they’re the same.