I would say the concept of liberal representative democracy is a scam, because on one hand lobbying and media control will decouple votes and decisionmakers from the actual collective good decision, and on the other hand party politics and and corruption will skew the fairness and representation even further from what is good.

And it's not like there aren't better concepts out there, the problem is more that almost all groups in liberal democracy, so parties, companies, the government itself are at best partially democratic and at worst authoritarian in nature. Especially companies obviously aren't usually democratic at all. So continued or deepening democratisation isn't actually in these groups interest because they or their leaders would lose power.

Council democracy or other direct democracy approaches are goals to work towards, or in some places just more representative and less dishonest voting would be a start.

In essence liberals like calling things democracy that on the whole make very few honest attempts at pursuing democracy, while still calling themselves democracies. I find nowadays my personal definition doesn't include these "democracies" and is more along the lines of "a continuous process that honestly tries to provide the most value for all people and pursues contious improvement toward that end."

It depends on the voting system. In the US there are two parties, that's just one party away from being like China. Scam is thinking US is fully democratic when you can only vote for two parties or throw the vote away.