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I'd recommend "The New Right" by Michael Malice, "Ship of Fools" by Tucker Carlson, and "The Case for Trump" by Victor Davis Hanson if you want to understand them.
One of the major issues is that the bureaucratic technocrat class has devoted most of their energy into setting up systems to prevent them from every having to face any serious consequences.
Pete Buttigieg is a great example. His Secretary of Transportation appointment was supposed to be an easy resume builder on his path to his Presidential run. He's been cocking it up, but everyone knows it won't hurt his political ambitions.
California should be the crown jewel example for bureaucratic Dems. But wherever competent management is needed you can see total failure. Electricity has been a disaster for over 20 years. The high speed rail project started planning in 1996 and has been a total failure throughout every step. Water planning is a disaster. Forest management to reduce fires is absent. The homelessness camps are entirely caused by mismanagement.
I could go on and on.
But to make it worse, DC is filled with people who have open contempt for the residents of "flyover states". They devote all of their energy to social signalling and fail at their actual jobs.
This is an important point. When you're part of an elite that has captured the institutions, then your rise can be very disconnected from your performance. Ursula von der Leyen was caught plagiarising her PhD, she was a failure as German Ministry of Defence, and thus became President of Europe.
Yet she was born to parents in the first Brussels elites, attended the right educational establishments, and she was skilled at being an ostensibly conservative politician who did/said what the German centre-left wanted.
She now fails upward in things like the EU's covid vaccination programme (where she apparently forgot that Northern Ireland and Ireland share an open border when she was threatening the UK with sanctions for having a more successful programme and thus embarassing the EU - she dropped the threats when someone smarter in Brussels told her that they'd just been negotiating for most of the past 5 years to keep that border open) and a future leadership position at the UN or IMF is something she is "earning."
Yeah, and then people try to tell me that "modern democracy" has made such great strides away from the bad old aristocratic past.
Again, I'm not so much saying we need to change the system so much as we need to stop lying about the system we already have.
Agreed. "Democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others" is a (defeasible) argument for less government intervention, if all the systems of keeping government power accountable have so little to say for them in absolute terms.
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