This is politics in a nutshell. People keep voting for the same politicians so they keep the same problems. Power infrastructure is poor? Keep voting for the same people that made it that way. Lots of violent crime in your city? Keep voting for the people that release criminals back into society immediately. Politics is so binary and broken in this country that we are just making fixable issues into permanent hardshi…
I live in a red state whose natural environment has been devastated by Republican policies for over a century. What people see here today is a remnant of primordial old-growth wilderness. But they think it's natural and how it's always been. Similarly to the way that austerity drives struggle and suffering for working class families, but they continue voting conservative against their own self-interest. The worse it gets, the more they vote Republican. Like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown right as he is about to kick it.
Democrats have been pushing for sustainability and a national rollout of renewable energy since at least the 1960s, definitely before the Earth First! movement of the 1980s, and probably all the way back to the strengthening of national parks by Teddy Roosevelt during the Progressive Era around 1900. It's odd to imagine a Republican as an environmentalist today, but there used to be many. That helps us to understand how the parties flipped due to stuff like Nixon's Southern Strategy.
We can blame Democrats for urban sprawl, high state sales tax, red tape/overregulation, basic hypocrisy in not living sustainably at an individual level and subscribing to neoliberalism like Republicans. But the economic and environmental problems we face today are mostly a result of decades of anti-sustainability legislation and subsidies for fossil fuel companies by Republicans. To say otherwise is revisionist history and not the academic view IMHO.
With the 100 year storms hitting the south every 2-10 years now, the environmental bill is coming due. It's all but certain that some number of southern states will flip blue. It will be interesting to see if that improves their infrastructure, or if it's too late.
But I do agree with you about the dysfunction. When the Boomers pass, I wonder if the parties will flip again and introduce a whole new set of wedge issues to argue about incessantly as the world burns.