Corporate power expanded.
Driven by the religion of market fundamentalism, capitalists championed the deregulation of industry and markets.
Money triumphed over people.
With deregulation the disparity between rich and poor reached historic proportions. Corporations ostensibly created to serve the public interest mutated into a malignancy eroding liberties and killing the planet.
The duplicitous meanings of democracy are used interchangeably by the plutocracy, leaving the American people ambivalent and confused. This was an engineered bait and switch that went virtually unnoticed by a naïve and somnolent public.
And thus capitalism, the very antithesis of democracy, became synonymous with representative government in the public mind. Few people have bothered to question, much less challenge, the secular matrimony of capitalism with democracy.