Spineless, unprincipled, constantly making excuses about why they're not doing anything, unwilling to do literally fucking ANYTHING to help the people they say they represent.
What are the underlying material conditions driving this?
Here in BC, Canada, the "social democratic" NDP government recently got a majority government, which means they can do literally anything they want. Pass any legislation they want. Pass any laws, any taxes, literally whatever the fuck they want.
And what have they done? FUCK ALL. Nothing. Not a single piece of legislation that I can think of. They're taking as long as they possibly can to implement $15 minimum wage, no paid sick days, no card check legislation, fucking NOTHING. Instead of using the pandemic as the obvious reason to pass this legislation they are hiding behind it as their excuse to avoid doing literally anything useful.
This seems to be the case all over the Western world.
WHY?
Well its a mixed bag. Certainly, there is a supplantation of mass democracy. Politicians largely abandoned the idea of actually changing the world in the 1990s and turned over their authority to non-majoritarian institutions, like finance, the EU and IMF. There is a belief, I think, stemming from fear of radical movements of the 1960s mixed with the crises of the 1970s and 1980s that convinced politicians that the world was too interconnected and complicated to be managed through party platforms and elections every 4 years or so.
At the same time, there is a paralysis, because even when radicals rise to power, they realize that they actually have little power to change anything anyway, due to the dissolution of organized labor and mass political participation.