> This is an oversimplification, but: early 20th century rise of communism was a violent backlash against the presiding monarchies and oligarchies who suppressed all attempts at gradual reform.
It seems to me that we are in a death spiral here. Our political class seems to only care about re-election, and actually fixing problems deprives you of polarizing wedge issues by which you can divide the voter base.
Even better if you can blame the other team for blocking you (whether true or not), and this is blatant on both sides of the political divide.
The expense of passing laws, mixed with ethical copenhagenism, compounds this. What we should be doing is science: making predictions, running small-scale tests, iterating and ramping what achieves the agreed, stated objectives, and discarding what doesn't work.
But because passing a law is expensive, we don't, and we get eternal programs that seem almost designed to do nothing other than make problems worse while funneling money to a preferred political party's funding machine.
It is also political suicide to only benefit a test group: New York once tested a homeless benefit program by randomly selecting applicants to be part of either the experimental (in the program) or control (left as-is) group.
They helped as many people as they had funds -- there was no withholding of possible aid -- and merely labeled those not accepted as being in a control group.
Not a single person in the entire experiment was worse off than they were before.
The resulting data would have provided evidence as to whether or not the program was effective, and thus worthy of expansion, but the public outcry painted the organizers as modern-day Nazis, "making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable."
And the program was prematurely shut down.
If you can't science, you can't effectively solve problems.
I don't see this resolving in any way but ugly, and I very much hope that I am wrong about that.