if you’re a Marxist then I’d expect you to think other Marxists have a better understanding of politics and propaganda than the average layperson

I believe people who study Marxism-Leninism seriously tend to have a more accurate understanding of politics and propaganda than the average liberal because history has demonstrated Marxism-Leninism's explanatory power in describing the relationship between past conditions and current conditions to accurately predict future conditions. That's very different than the OP's suggestion that humans have an innate hierarchy of value that expresses itself in the form of better people espousing better ideas, which is the same self-justifying vanity that led colonial powers throughout history to make the same claim to justify stealing land from "barbarous" natives who demonstrated their inferiority through their "failure to develop civilization".