There is an English proverb, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
This is glib and ‘obvious’, and prompted H G Wells to write a memorable short story: The Country of the Blind (out of copyright, and easily available on the Web, if you’d rather read it now, before I give away any of its secrets).
The point of the story is that the blind are attached to their blindness, so the chief character—who is one-eyed—is dismissed as a self-seeking weirdo. The blind eventually decide to have him blinded, in order to “cure” him. (If I remember rightly, they also consider putting him to death.)
Wells saw the real power of our need to affiliate, to be part of an “us”—and to turn against people who are clearly “not one of us.”
The Country of the Blind is just a story, but in the real world people with unjustified prejudices elect leaders who share their prejudices. People who can see further, who may have a less distorted take on the facts, are likely to be insulted in social media, to get threatening and obscene phone calls, and to be kept out of power.