Most frustrating of all to me is the Enlightened Centrism memes which equate a rational middle position with agreeing exactly half with both sides and poisons the well for anyone trying to find policy that is effective, regardless of its origin.
A big part of why our politics is so broken is the culture war. It's a godsend to incompetent and corrupt politicians since it allows them to pay lip service or toss low-cost political bones to their "base" while freeing them from the need to do anything hard or get any real results. With the culture war politicians don't have to be competent or earn your vote.
Works for both "red" and "blue" sides. There are terribly run places with all-Republican single party rule.
Unfortunately the trend has been toward hyper-polarization on culture war issues, making it even harder to select for competence over "correct" cultural alignment with the base. The right likes to bash political correctness but they have their own form of it as well as their own "safe spaces" where only their speech is tolerated. It's definitely a both-sides problem.
I found it fascinating and I think would form the base of your "American Competence Party". Sign me up!
You are not thinking clearly about the history of American politics if you group all the movements that called themselves "progressive" together as one.
Someone says, "X isn't producing the results people who advocate for X wanted." Then someone else inevitably chimes in, "X was never intended to produce those results from the beginning! It was a plot to benefit a few at the expense of everyone else all along!" X is variously Capitalism, Communism, in this case Progressivism...
What is the point of making comments like this? It seems very useless and gets us no further towards a discussion of things that might work.
Please drop the rote attempts at agitation. Agitation has never motivated anyone to make the world better. Only a vision of how things could be instead can do that.