unlike, say, analytical chemistry, politics has an active opinion on how each of us live our lives and can't be "left to the expert"That's true of computing also, though, which is why you have a lot of non-techies with opinions about computing. Even if you aren't a technologist, you will likely be impacted by technology whether you want to be or not, because it structures a large amount of daily life, at least unless you are a hermit in the mountains. From that perspective, it's perfectly reasonable for everyone to have opinions on technology. Unfortunately, as with politics, the opinions not based on any kind of understanding of how things work tend not to be as useful in figuring out how to improve them.
Ted Nelson's version of it [1] is something like: technology is too important to be left up to the techies, but if nobody but techies understands technology at all, it will by default be left up to them, because nobody else will be able to say anything sensible about it. Therefore regular people need to learn at least something about technology, enough to analyze it intelligently and make decisions for themselves. That's how I view politics as well.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib_/_Dream_Machines