One long misunderstanding

The exilic justification for communal rule was a halakhic linking of the exilic situation to the situation in biblical Israel. The problem was that the halakhic rulings were not sufficiently sophisticated about the fundamental political issues the leadership of the community in exile needed to address. What evolved as a result was the modern phenomenon we call ultra-Orthodoxy, which today is starving the Jewish people of its proper political leadership in all dimensions (religious, secular, spiritual, material, what have you) as the ultra-Orthodox leadership clings desperately to its waning authority while the people, one by one, opt out of the traditional system altogether and embrace the ideology of the foreign gods of their host cultures. 

The ultra-Orthodox leadership has defined itself as accountable only to those members of Jewish society who accept their leadership as authoritative and legitimate. They style themselves as the elders of the Jewish people but on cursory examination we see they have been abandoned by most of the Jewish people and have as a result in fact lost whatever authority and legitimacy their traditional forebears might once have claimed. Today’s halakhic leaders are a shame to the lofty teachings they claim to uphold. They are like the medicine men of a dying aboriginal tribe, unequal to the task of bringing their people into the modern era and so, instead, they find themselves having to superintend the disintegration of what surely was a great and glorious culture, and, because of their own mediocrity, having to witness its demise. 

Jewish traditional teachings need a renewal; some fresh, young, hearty blood to make its wisdom flourish again. What's missing is vitality. The ultra-Orthodox Jewish leadership has, on account of hubris, become decadent and degenerate in its scholarship and in its conduct. The same error that in ancient, biblical times led to the loss of sovereignty and to the loss of the homeland is leading now, in modern, exilic times, to the loss of vitality and to the loss of effective political leadership. The rabbinate were no better at maintaining the integrity of the Jewish people's political/economic system than the prophets and the kings were at maintaining the integrity of the Israelite's political/economic system. 

It's been one long misunderstanding. The people and its leadership has never really 'got it.'