Public leaders don't understand what the public wants or why regardless of the public leaders reputations within their own domains of expertise

I am pretty sympathetic to the view that we do not really have a polarization in America.  We have a polarization among our self-perceived establishment classes (establishment party politics, mainstream media, the wealthy, academia, etc.) who are going through a crisis of confidence owing to the success of meritocracy.  Meritocracy led to productivity, productivity led to non-value add ideological signaling, non-value add ideological signaling led to disavowal of old accorded respect to institutions and "experts" by the general public.  

The privileged are in surplus and have no clear pathways in a modern world of productivity and accountability.

From Re-Assessing Elite-Public Gaps in PoliticalBehavior Joshua D. Kertzer.  From the Abstract.

Political scientists often criticize psychological approaches to the study of politics on the grounds that many psychological theories were developed on convenience samples of college students or members of the mass public, whereas many of the most important decisions in politics are made by elites, who are presumed to differ systematically from ordinary citizens. This paper proposes an overarching framework for thinking about differences between elites and masses, presenting the results of a meta-analysis of 162 paired treatments from paired experiments on political elites and mass publics, as well as an analysis of 12 waves of historical elite and mass public opinion data on foreign policy issues over a 43 year period. It finds political scientists both overstate the magnitude of elite-public gaps in decision-making, and misunderstand the determinants of elite-public gaps in political attitudes, many of which are due to basic compositional differences rather than to elites’ domain-specific expertise.

Public leaders don't understand what the public wants or why regardless of the public leaders reputations within their own domains of expertise.  You have to know the truth.