Two books that have influenced my view on these matters are
https://www.amazon.com/Political-Economy-Dictatorship-Wintro...
and
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674537514
One theme in the first is that a tinpot dictator wants to keep as much of the country's wealth for themselves and spend the minimum on oppression and buying people off so you don't need to spend on oppression. Replace "themselves" with "donors" and you are talking about politicians in democratic countries, particularly after the Reagan era in the US.
Another is the difference between racism in South Africa and racism in the US. If 10% of the population stole 10% of the wealth of the rest, the privileged class could nearly double its standard of living. (South Africa) If 90% percent of the population stole 10% of the wealth of the rest (arguably the US) the recipients would hardly notice, even stealing 90% of the wealth of the victims would create an immiserated class without all that much benefit to the benefactors.
Olson would point out that small minorities can profitably organize politically to benefit themselves at the expense of the majority, but it's truly rare to see programs like Social Security and Obamacare [1] that have wide benefit because they have substantial costs; the cause of "throw corrupt politicians out" which is of interest to everyone except a tiny minority of politicians and donors is increasingly out of reach because the majority is divided by... identity politics.
[1] A diagnosis of why the health care system is so intractable in the US is that it is not a "system" but divided into employer health insurance, medicare, medicaid, Tricare, VA, statewide Obamacare markets, etc. The relative ease of implementing partial solutions that satisfy a few people is favored by social physics but means we pay more for a system where we fall through the cracks. Similarly poverty programs oriented around "protected classes" will always have a margin of people who have the same problems as people in protected classes (I see hillbillies have "black problems" including meaningless but fatal encounters with the police) which leads to the spectacle of "spending more and more" and "the problem goes away" which alienates voters from responsible politics.
I could write a lot about it, but here are a few points.
(1) I see Biden and Obama running cringey ads asking for money on YouTube. Biden's performance is direct and sincere, I genuinely like him as a person, I think he's a good role model. But he's got more money than I do: if I send him the $5 he's asking for I will get $500 worth of spam from left-wing groups that want more. This isn't the road to political engagement.
(2) The business of center-X parties is not political engagement but rather political disengagement. Wintrobe's book
https://www.amazon.com/Political-Economy-Dictatorship-Wintro...
presents a model of a dictator that I think is enlightening to democratic politics. He considers a dictator who'd like to steal from his country and spend the spoils as much as he can but is constrained by the need to spend something to "buy off" the public and interest groups. Similarly in the US, a politician would like to deliver the maximum spoils to supportive interest groups without making big expensive promises for the general public. So you get Clinton's "Triangulation" and a general comfort with winning elections with a 50.2% margin and having gridlock because if you won 65% of the vote and controlled both chambers you'd have no excuse why you aren't delivering on popular promises.
(3) Similarly there is Baudrillard's idea of "cooling" in which the whole political system and media exist to disengage people. Even elections themselves exist to blunt the threat of real change that might happen if people had to overthrow the system if they had any problem with it. Center-X parties have been in the business of "cooling out the mark" for a long time and have been very comfortable with failure and near-failure situations such as Germany's interminable plan to shut down nuclear power. They want you to be barely engaged enough to pull the lever for them, but they don't want you to be engaged enough to make anything difficult for them.
Trouble is that AfD really wants you to be engaged and their whole strategy is organized around it.
Marx saw communism as an end state where it is "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs". He imagines that technological development is going to lead to a post-scarcity economy where the intense conflicts we feel everyday are not going to be so intense and people can flower.
When Lenin overthrew the Czar he found himself in an immediate state of war with other elements of society and saw the need to establish a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" which could suppress any elements of society that would want to restore the old order. The mission of that dictatorship was to be "socialist construction" which would end in the state of communism promised by Marx.
To be fair, in the time period from 1917 to 1960 or so the Soviet Union grew very quickly. They cracked a lot of heads (particularly repressed poor and rich peasants to get capital to build up their industrial base) but they went from a backwards agrarian country to having the capacity to resist Germany in WWII with the help of the allies and very rapidly developed nuclear weapons, space travel and other advanced technology.
Non-aligned countries like India were very impressed by the rapid development of the Soviet Union and hoped they could learn something from it in order to develop themselves since in the "imperialist phase" the world system seemed to promote development in countries like the UK at the expense of the rest of the world.
The point of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that competition in the society is suppressed and if you look at the Communist Party in a country like the USSR or the New China it is an organization where 2% or so of the population gets special privileges so that they can control the rest of society. They are supposed to be disciplined by the party and lose their privileges if they don't act in the interests of the party.
This really great book describes the conflicts that arise
https://www.amazon.com/Political-Economy-Dictatorship-Wintro...
Basically the manager of a business under communism has the motivation to use their personal relationships and knowledge to feather their own nest. In the long term this erodes the power of the party and the effectiveness of the economy. Purges are one mechanism that puts fear into managers and keeps them "on track".
In a competitive economy you have the same hazard but in a competitive economy a manager who steals too much from a business will be out-competed and not have a business to steal from anymore.
It's very easy to talk about communism, but it's not so hard to practice. The New China is an interesting case study. Despite recent backsliding on the part of Xi Jinping, the rulers of China have thought hard about the experience of the USSR, other communist states, and their own country to develop a system that is competitive on the world stage.
https://www.amazon.com/Political-Economy-Dictatorship-Wintro...
expounds a framework in which politicians have a certain amount of resources to spend on preserving the system (e.g. spending on legitimacy, welfare, police and military) vs resources they can spend on their own priorities.
Addressing inequality involves real money, as does improving security.
"Culture war" offerings on the left and right are free or very low cost so they are popular with politicians.
Wintrobe's book [1] has an analysis of a tinpot dictator who wants to steal everything a country has but has to spend some resources on buying people off and some on repression so that he can get away with it. Bill Clinton made a similar maneuver around 'triangulation' that amounts to trying to share as little of the spoils to mass supporters as possible so that he can really give as much as the spoils as he can to donors.
In the case of Bill Clinton he got the full court press from [2] so he could say he was under so much pressure from the right that he didn't have to do anything for the left.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, made a clear show of disdain for the activist faction of the party but they were supposed to vote for her because, hey, she's a woman. She also hoped to win by default against Trump.
Harris didn't show the activist fringe much love, but she didn't show disdain for it either. She was also hoping to win by default, which didn't happen. Because she didn't define herself, she was defined by Fox News. She would have had to have broken visibly with the activist fringe, however, which seems like it could have been a risky move although the dirty secret is that the activist fringe may not actually vote and if it does vote it is concentrated in places where their vote doesn't count.
For now, Trumps's salvos in the culture war are 'cheap talk' that pleases certain people but doesn't consume resources that are coveted by donors. I suspect it will be unpopular too, since people are going to blame you for things once you get in power.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Political-Economy-Dictatorship-Wintro...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife