The proclivity of politicians to marginalize expertise, in general, as meaningless and elitist is short-sighted (at best). The world is complicated and the complexity grows by the day. Curation of knowledge and having delegated trust on complex matters is essential to governing our civilization by consent.
If we reach a point where consensus is essentially impossible because a strong majority of people are no longer willing to delegate understanding of complex things they have no interest in then how is it still possible to govern via consent? At that point, we will have to revert to monarchy and/or authoritarianism to break the persistent stalemates of popular consensus. The right-wing of western democracies are playing with fire and they're either too stupid or too greedy to realize where this strategy will end up.