With very few exceptions, politicians do know perfectly fine what they are doing. Each of them has a large budget to hire several staffers presenting every iss

With very few exceptions, politicians do know perfectly fine what they are doing. Each of them has a large budget to hire several staffers presenting every issue to them in ways they understand best, each government has a huge apparatus of various departments with domain experts analyzing every situation from every reasonable perspective and if all of that fails, barely and university or institute would fail to respond to a request for input from an elected official. Any and all ignorance of any significant politician is by choice. You can't push the oppression a decision causes to the maximum you'll get away with at that point in time without understanding the issue first.