Well, first off, we're talking about a representative democracy. So you don't get to vote for what your leaders actually do, you only get to vote for who they are, out of a very small list of potential major-party candidates. So right off the bat, you're voting for people who have to, at a minimum, convince the people who specialize in the electoral process to support them. And if you don't like the guy you have, then your only option is to pick someone else whose main difference is being the opposite on a handful of cultural wedge issues. This introduces severe value drift in and of itself.

As an example of this, consider right-to-repair. In cases where it has been put up to a popular vote, it wins dramatically - like, 75% to 86% in favor. But if you go to legislators, they laugh you out of the room; and if they don't laugh you out of the room the governor vetoes it. This is an issue where the American public see it as obvious that repair should be open to all; while many of our politicians either just disagree with the concept, are worried about "intellectual property theft", or don't want to be the first to sponsor something that will wind up being in the next election's attack ads.

So what we have is a situation where Americans and Europeans are more aligned with one another than they are with American politicians.

I also really hate the whole "you get the leaders that you deserve" mentality, especially when applied to non-democratic societies. Not everyone voted for those leaders, nor does everyone always have the opportunity to vote in the first place. The whole concept of a "nation" is at best a convenient fiction; and worst an outright cancer that has fucked over several regions of the world. If you do not understand the internal divides of a nation, at least on a basic level, then you're just engaging in useless stereotyping.