The US: reaching Peak Failure in multiple areas?

There is an article ("Salt Lake City has no more affordable neighborhoods, as gentrification turns 'scary'") in the Salt Lake Tribune about how there are no affordable neighborhoods left in the city. The "affordability problem" is a function of lack of housing supply.  

Lack of supply is a function of restrictions on development and intensity that worked okay when the population was much smaller and household sizes were bigger.  Now that half of all US households are one person, and the population is more than double what it was in 1960, those restrictions aren't working ("Understanding DC's housing market").

Fareed Zakaria ("Forget pronouns. Democrats need to become the party of building things") and Ezra Klein ("What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds") say we should be building.  

How do you build when government has been denigrated--not just by Republicans, but Democrats too, through the adoption of the pro-market anti-government principle of neoliberalism ("Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems," Guardian).

Sonny Bunch writes about the stagnation in celebrities and culture ("As stars and politicians age, we’re entering a new era of stagnation," Washington Post). Increasingly, media is controlled by a handful of actors, and we're so dumbed down--Real Housewives and other reality shows are an increasing proportion of programming--why should we be surprised.

Certainly, the inability of Democrats to pass legislation and the minoritarian control of the federal government means that it's pretty much in stasis.  Trump's "Infrastructure Week" became a running joke, but the Democrats can't get an infrastructure bill passed/past Joe Manchin in the Senate.

Climate change ("Our climate change turning point is right here, right now," Guardian) ...

One million plus deaths from covid and consistent anti-vaccination fervor on the part of a large enough segment of our population. (Japan's death rate from covid is something like 5% of the US.)

This from a nation that won World War II, put people on the Moon, built a national highway system, built an incredible array of buildings and infrastructure during the country's growth period and even in the Depression, etc.

It comes down to the systems we had that worked for a long time, don't work now, because conditions have changed, and our systems and approaches are no longer appropriate for the times.

I'm starting to think of it as "Peak Failure." (Like multiple organ failure leading to death.)

Government, stuck in neutral, can't do anything. 

Partly it's because a focus on system maintenance as opposed to innovation makes change impossible.  (I guess my real problem is adopting the approach of "continuous process improvement" and most people are totally uninterested.)

I've mentioned before John Friedmann's Planning in the Public Domain and how it conceptualizes action and sanction--positive and negative-and how it distinguishes between radical and revolutionary change.

Basically, our processes aren't set up to be able to be flexible and innovative.  And they aren't generating positive outcomes.  It was okay when we had a lot of resources.  But we've dissipated these resources, especially by defunding government (the continual lowering of taxes by Republicans), which is why increasingly, government fails.

Especially with anti-government, anti-people authoritarian Republicans able to stymie action.

A few years ago I joked with Simon Anholt, co-author of the book Brand America, that under Trump, Brand America became:

Can't Do. Won't Do. You Do. F* You.

We've definitely moved from Can Do Nation to Can't Do Nation.

-- "In a Plague-Time, Can-Do Nation Is Unmasked as Can’t-Do," Medium