Two extremely common folk critiques of American politics that are contradictory:
1. Politicians focus too much on getting reelected and have no principles. The country would be way better off if politicians focused on doing what is right rather than what is popular.
2. Politicians are so out of touch with the common people, they care more about ideology and party instead of reflecting the common sense views of their constituents. Politicians should vote the way the common man in their district would vote.
Not as contradictory as they sound, sadly.
“Politicians spend their lives in an elite political bubble, cut off from the morals and folkways of the non-elite. They invariably go native in rich urban America, making them comfortable with things that their (poor?)(non-urban?) constituents find abhorrent. Insofar as they actually care about anything on a principled level, they care about the artificial total war between parties, in a way that makes common-sense decent-person negotiation impossible. But in fact they are mostly driven by a lack of principle, by the need to get reelected whatever it takes, and therefore they stir up their bases with simplistic red-meat attacks that exacerbate that very same artificial total war.”
This is not a good take; it fails to understand the sources of culture war, or the depth of its entrenchment, in a major way. But it is a coherent take.