Now you know (of) a single person. Our public servants are largely fine people. We get stuff that's weird because of people being dancing monkeys for campaign finance. This is actually, in my opinion, overt, specific and designed entertainment product. It's very rarely an attachment to principle or thought out - one reason Reagan did so well is that he pretty much believed a lot of what he said ( not all - you have to be tactical too ) . He said, not what people around him, said.

Clinton wasn't as much of rigid principles, but you got the feeling he was, outside of being very charismatic, genuine. Even Dubya, I more or less trusted.

Use your anthropic principle - there would not be people saying things like what, say Ted Cruz says unless there was positive feedback for it.

I don't think nationalizing campaigns works, either. Huge public choice problem and a slightly different set of incentives.

I've worked a bit with actual government employees, and they were uniformly great except for one clot of them. Total observer bias, though.

All in all, I think the shear between what we actually want and what we say we want is the cause, and is an excellent example of revealed preferences. Why else would there have ever been some policies we've seen, like racial laws in the post-Reconstruction South? How does that ever make any sense at all, yet so much energy and time went into it?

To misquote Walt Kelly ( of the Pogo cartoons ) - "we has met the enemy, and it is us."

I have many fairly right-wing friends, and most of them, when pressed a bit, will clarify what they are afraid of. It's not nothing. They have their bias, I have mine. I'm able to talk to them about these things without much ugliness.