1.) "Lobbying is not a tool designed for the rich/powerful. It is literally just communicating with to politicians your interests. Corporations spend a lot on lobbying, but that's because they have to pay "corporate rates"."
Sorry, no. In other countries what goes as 'lobbying' in US would be mostly classified as blatant corruption of the politics. Citizens United also...
Corporations are centralized entities that have access to a lot of money and (also through money) to lobbying specialists with know-how hot to push their interests.
Normal citizens face and uphill struggle in every step - they have to get organized, get money, get specialists. This is not a level playing field, and the argumentation that it is, is exactly what those with an advantage engage in.
Shouldn't voting for the people who represent your interests be actually enough? What the lobbying does is that whoever you vote-in, if not already corrupted, will be corrupted by the lobbyists. So democracy (will of the people) is just a theory, wool over your eyes, similarly as communism was, the practice is totally different. People are waking up to that, and that's the reason for the rise of all anti-system parties all over the west.
2.) more grass-roots involvement: yes. Thinking that that is enough: hell no, people did that, got disillusioned when that repeatedly yields minimal results
3.) Colonisation of North America was not a central plan. You repeatedly bringing central plan just points to your ideological blinders.
4.) Ultimately, it is not about who has the power and where does the legitimacy of power come from, but how is that power wielded. Wield it to improve the lives of your citizens, you gain legitimacy even if you got the power in an illegitimate way. Wield it to enrich a narrow elite, at the expense of everybody else, and you will start to lose the legitimacy, even if you originally got it fairly. Nothing new there.
What is new is that the elites in China managed the country in a way that significantly improved the lives of its citizens, while the elites in the west managed their way into dystopian future ruled by mega-corporations, with melting middle class and unsustainable levels of debt.
This goes against the prevailing wisdom in the west that liberal democracies are the only ones capable of taking care of their citizens, while the authoritarian rest is just a cesspool of corruption and inept governance.
Other examples of authoritarian countries reaching (or at least starting in a significant way their path to) prosperity are Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan... (all of them were authoritarian at the time their economic boom started and progressed).