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What, specifically, is the alternative? The president does literally everything? We have elections for each dmv clerk?
Or maybe we draw some kind of line and say some jobs should have elections and others aren't worth the effort.
(And no, you can't just say "the job of dmv clerk should't exist" because someone has to do it and I'd much rather that person be answerable to an elected government than a corporation or worse)
In the U.S. that happened because of legislation and new legal doctrines in the 1930s. In Europe it happened because of increasing delegation of power to the centralized E.U. bureaucracy.
It's just remained largely intact because the scary deep state is just people with careers who know more about statecraft than Joe Rogan listeners.
The European parliament is elected. When people don't shoot themselves in the foot and put weird politicians in it, being a bigger group means more power to coerce large companies into behaving better. See: GDPR or small things like removal batteries or removal or roaming fees. So in a sense it allows people to recover some power over large companies.
Generally attacks on the EU sound like they come from other countries or large companies that would benefit from it being split so that individual countries can be better bullied into submission (though the EU has not been very competent at not bullying itself into submission to the recent new American leader).
Optimally, democracy is participative. People don’t just vote, they govern themselves. Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” does a great job capturing what that looks like. Today, the most democratic systems are what you have in the Scandinavian countries. Small, homogenous electorates can achieve social consensus on what their society should look like. And then they can act through parliament to effectuate changes.
The E.U.-wide electorate is so big and fractious that it has basically zero ability to achieve social consensus. And the E.U. Parliament has no power to initiate legislation anyway. So “democracy” is reduced to rubber stamping the initiatives of the Commission, which are in turn largely decided by the permanent bureaucracy.
The European Commission is made up of people nominated by the European Council, which itself is made up of ministers from each EU member (i.e. they are elected). The commissioners have to pass a confidence vote from the European Parliament, which again is elected. They can also be be forced to resign by the parliament with a no-confidence vote.
(Side-note: the EU's sin isn't being anti-democratic. The sin is being so confusing that it's easy to make accusations of being anti-democratic. Because no one really understands it if they aren't paying attention. There's a European Council and a Council of the European Union - wtf)
What you’re describing is a system where the people with the key power of legislative initiative are insulated from the electorate by multiple layers of indirection. It’s kind of like the original U.S. executive. The President was elected by the Electoral College, by Electors nominated by state legislatures (i.e. they are elected). The point of that design was to insulate the executive from democracy.
But note that, even in that system, designed in 1789 by people who were skeptical of democracy, the most powerful body, the House, was directly elected. The House had legislative initiative—it can originate legislation. And it had exclusive legislative initiative over spending bills.
And note that the layers of indirection in the U.S. system were justified at the time on the basis that the federal government was one of limited powers and could only legislate in certain areas. The only bodies with plenary legislative power were the state legislatures, which were directly elected. But the E.U. isn’t a government of limited powers. It can legislate in any area.
Moreover, criticizing FDR's response to the great depression while solely condemning Europe for its post-war policies isn't a great counterargument.