You won't see this often, but I'm about to defend politicians (sort of).

There are scumbag politicians just like any other position, career, etc. I am also speaking from a US perspective. That's out of the way.

I think there are many politicians who went into politics with good intentions (even if their goals would have bad results if accomplished), but were ultimately shredded by the meat grinder.

There are hundreds of millions of us with at least dozens of high level concerns that politicians are expected to address and/or care about.

I don't intimately follow every single social, economic, financial (etc) issue that one could follow. I can't. It's impossible to care deeply about every single topic, yet most of us expect that of politicians. We get angry when they brush over our very important issues (THE issues).

Frankly, no person can reasonably manage the government we have now. Even our presidents, arguably the most powerful people in government, have a very small view of what is actually happening in the government. Our Congress can't reasonably keep an eye on what the other branches are doing. The state is so absolutely massive that checks and balances only have a hope in hell of working a very small percentage of the time.

Our government structure is quite wonderfully designed... IF the state is as small as it should be.

We expect our politicians to intimately care about and understand hundreds of incredibly complex issues when we can't even do that ourselves.

The only rational path forward I see is to remove government from almost every aspect of life so political leaders can focus on the few things government actually should be doing (national defense, a justice system, etc). Even our judges can't keep up with all the nonsense, which frequently leads to contradictions and unjust outcomes. Nothing is working right because it's all too large and complicated.

Expansion seems to always lead to corruption, probably because the thing becomes too large to actually monitor and maintain. It becomes too easy for crooks to embed themselves in the shadows cast by a massive machine with far too many moving parts.

Our politicians seem inadequate because they are. And so are we. No one is adequate for the job and never will be as things are.

WE are the problem for expecting government to deal with every issue that we face.