It was common to run into not just politicians, but people working for state agencies or influential community members who were shockingly incompetent. While we did not know him, Leon Finney is a great example of the kind of wheeling and dealing I'm thinking of.
At the level we were familiar with, this wasn't a right/left paradigm (state bureaucrats are at least nominally non-partisan). It had more to do with which party had comfortable majorities, and thus offered safe career options. Our state senator is not an intelligent person. He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses. All he knows is that if he toes the line, the party won't fund a primary challenger and he'll still have a job after the next election cycle.
My republican operative acquaintances report the same deal on the other side of the isle of course, though usually with more idiots as the right tends to disdain politics and smart people go into business, whereas many more smart people on the left go to politics.
While judging that at such a remote is hard, the Roman Republic was such a culture, with strong patronage networks. And while we may or may not agree with Rome's goal, that culture didn't seem to produce mediocrity.
I think this is true of a lot of representatives at both the state and federal level in both the senate and house, in both parties. And it's a huge problem, because it means that the unelected party leadership wields a tremendous amount of power.
It's a representation of power, and reality is that some people are leaders, and some are loyal vassals or subjects. Most legislative people are idiots and are really supposed to be idiots. Typically an executive cares about a set of issues or objectives, and puts the A-Team there.
At a state level, you may have 3-5,000 appointments to make in a big state, so there's a hierarchy of need. The A-players go to the priorities, the more professional "players" go to the operationally critical entities (Think your DMV and Tax Collections) and loyal idiots get scattered around the various places where the staff keep the plane flying.
The cult of personality around MAGA brings more different people. They'll absorb into the system or go away eventually.
This is "yet more evidence" that science likes to collect, there's no new paradigm hidden there.
On your second paragraph, that's because the people you are talking about are anti-democratic themselves. Even the way your phrase is written singles out "mediocre white males" outside of "disadvantaged" despite what the actual conditions those people have in the real world. That's anti-democratic by itself.
IMO the right broadly misses the fact that government can be efficient, and that a robust universal healthcare system can be good for business dynamism by helping small businesses.
The left loves the government too much and always seems to think if we can just government and NGO a bit more, that'll work (generalization). And that businesses are kind of a dirty idea.
This is a distinguishing feature of USA politics, but it isn’t universal. Several right-wing parties in Europe tend to be pretty pro-welfare state (they would just prefer that foreigners not have access to it). It’s generally the centre-right, as the party of the country’s largest business interests, who put up the most opposition to such benefits due to the level of taxation required to provide them.
Meanwhile, in China, run by a party that is still regarded as left by several international leftist umbrella groupings, social safety nets are intentionally kept to a minimum: it is a core principle of the CCP’s anthropology that labour is what makes people human, and people should always be compelled towards some kind of work, like it or lump it.
I live in the southeast US and get to talk politics with a lot of people on the right. This isn't accurate.
The dislike diversity programs because those programs naturally take away opportunities from people who are better qualified. Sure there are many candidates who will be both the most qualified for the position and meet a diversity standard, but when you force the diversity qualification you force the organization to only draw from a smaller section of the pool. It's the same problem that people on the left have with restrictive policies around immigration potentially depriving organizations of the top candidates from around the world, just more localized. They are exactly the same issue, just viewed from different angles.
Regarding social safety nets, the primary concern has always been fraud. I've heard variations of this conversation for decades and it's always fraud. The idea that a safety net is not intended to be a long term lifestyle. They prioritize the idea of a "hand up, not a hand out" with a goal of providing temporary assistance with financial education, career training, etc. It has nothing to do with removing something that can protect the disadvantaged and everything to do with trying to solve the disadvantage itself long term.
Hope that provides some context.
"Better qualified" generally boils down to "people who look like me".
"Fraud" is usually code for "make someone else pay". People make all sorts of passionate appeals to all sorts of moral culpability and scamming, which are mostly bullshit. Specific to the Southeast US, basically that translates to we don't want to have people on social services rolls that the state/locality has a cost share, but we're happy to lobby to make the rules such that the "hand up" is a transition to Social Security Disability, which is funded by not them.
...it's math. If you hire from 60% instead of 100%, you're intentionally eliminating potential candidates. Whether you're talking about immigration policy or diversity policy. It's just math.
On fraud, I hear just as much concern about disability fraud. If it's coming out of taxes, either state or federal, taxpayers are paying for it or going into debt for it or seeing the currency inflated for it.
They complain that black people are admitted to fancy colleges despite being "less qualified", but reality is the DEI/affirmative action really protected white kids place in the social order, especially the legacy people whose qualifications are marginal. Those kids are being squeezed out by smarter, harder working Asian kids, so those white kids are going to southern prestige schools.
People laugh at culture warriors because of stuff that is targeted at stupid people like the Starbucks "war on Christmas". But there's a more serious/malignant aspect to it as well.
Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged. However, even the left has sometimes had a habbit of neglecting the career and social concerns of "mediocre white males" in a way that is likely to make them vulnerable to the sort of recruitment that the article describes.