If I looked for it, I could name many not-so-intelligent and uneducated ministers all around the world. We can start by naming plagiarized PhDs in Germany, including (ironically) one education minister.
However, if by 'ruling class' you don't necessarily mean the government, then maybe you're right. If that's what you're saying, then the government would be ruled by the economy which would be controlled by those who were put on such a track at a young age.
Though he is saying that the ruling elites are ruling because they are smart, and not that the ruling elites are smart because they are ruling.
There are a lot of ideological systems that are created simply to misdirect the public's attention away from actual important issues and toward infighting or intellectual dead ends or towards the goals of the propagandists.
Let me give you one example: the murder rate in the US is the lowest its been since 1963. The way the media directs the public's attention and magnifies the coverage of the violence that does happen makes the public think that there's a huge terrorism, crime and gun violence crisis.
Anyone who wants to actually figure out what is going on just needs to look at the numerical data, but that's boring. Instead political life is a bunch of people reposting whatever article got published today to freak the public out or very narrowly guide them into strengthening their belief in a particular ideological narrative.
People aren't stupid, but given limited information they are easily influenced.
The masses know they are losing, they just don't have the leaders able to fight the ruling class and so are blindly lashing out at all authority - the current situation is rather like the Great Rising [1].
Yep, this is true. However mass shootings over the same period of time have been going up. Compared to the rest of the industrialized western world, we do have a gun violence crisis. Considering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r..., the US is sitting between Uruguay and Montenegro with a rate of 10.54 per 100,000. Whether or not it's been falling since 1963 (and I know it has been) it's still at an appalling place and we deserve better. Not to privilege the West over everywhere else but we are closer to most other so-called "Western countries" culturally speaking than countries that are not traditionally part of the West. Within that framework, Finland has the next-highest rate, and it's at 3.25 per 100,000 (i.e. about three times less).
By Edelman's definition, it would appear his elites are more fit to govern than the masses (again, by his definition). That doesn't mean the latter are ignored. But if you put every issue to a vote, the people who have experienced less worldly exposure, less challenge in critical thinking, who are not consuming information from outside their narrow social circles and are not economically tied into the whole will always win. If you're a fan of good long-term decision making, that's a lousy prospect.