Once again, much of the state of America can be summarized as "this awful experience is a direct result of the Reagan administration, but most people don't realize it".
It only takes a few years or even months of Republican rule to install judges that will deem any regulations unconstitutional, to allow time-bounded authorizations to lapse, to fire large numbers of public servants who keep the administrative state running, or simply to use the bully pulpit to tarnish the reputation of federal bureaucracy so that individuals will refuse to interact with them. Building those institutions as credible, competent forces takes somewhere between years and lifetimes.
Republicans have not had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate since 1907.
Meanwhile the Democrats have to spend every term fixing the things the GOP broke, only for voters to reward them by saying "you didn't fix everything and this dude promises the magical tax fairy will build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" and restoring to power the party that breaks everything and raises the deficit.
Things are NOT the same with both parties, and discussing the systemic issues both with the electoral college, the Senate - a body so undemocratic that the Supreme Court has literally ruled it unconstitutional for any state to have a legislative body with membership based on land instead of population[2], as well as the fact that it's much easier and faster to tear things down than to build them up - is not "making excuses". It's trying to educate people, despite the fact that a significant chunk of them don't want to understand how things work, they want to act on feelings.
[1]: https://www.nationaljournal.com/member/magazine/top-gop-prio...
Which is, by design in the American system, not possible without strict control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate, and possibly the Supreme Court.
As long as voters continue to not vote for democrats for "not doing enough", the democrats will never be able to "do enough". That's inherent in the system! Republican voters meanwhile understand the concept of "I'm going to put them in charge and see what they end up doing", even if I disagree with the things they want and their methods, they understand democracy very well!
Like NAFTA.
When it comes to making people lives worse the democrats are just as capable as the republicans.
It's just that when it comes to helping people. Oh no. Woe is us we can't do anything with the presidency, and a super majority in every branch of government.
This happens once every 20 years.
But democratic cultists always come out of the wood work to explain why this is actually ~Reagans~ ~Bushs~ ~Bush2s~ Trumps fault.
The truth is that neither Democrats nor Republicans want to solve the problems of the working class and the poor, because both parties are financed by the wealthy.
They had 72 Days in 2009 to fix everything! Both parties are the same! /s
The Republicans keep doing it... Lieberman, Nelson, Manchin, Sinema, et al.
The Democrats on the other hand are beholden to corporate interests which limits how far left they can go.
I'd like to think the article left out some important context that I'm now missing, because it'd sure be a weird thing to complain about from a partisan perspective if it could have been solved with the stroke of a pen.
If Democrats didn't adopt a more pro-business face, would there even be a democrat party anymore?
People seem to want democrats to do what FDR did. FDR's democrats held like a 70% control in the Senate! He was able to cow the supreme court because he had a credible threat to actually pack the court, like, according to the actual rules.
As long as party majority leader is not a democrat for example, you cannot guarantee any judge actually gets their appointment voted on. Yet young democrats are dissatisfied with democrats "letting" McConnell steal the appointments.
Want democrats to do something? You have to give them the power to do so!
I think that thinking of it this way shifts the blame unduly; it's not like Republicans as well as Democrats don't bear the blame for continuing harmful policies, just because those policies were instituted by Republicans. As to Democrats, the first Democratic administration that was elected after Reagan did so by running away from many traditional Democratic priorities, and both other Democratic administrations had to deal with a recalcitrant Congress for at least a substantial portion of their time in office.
Even if they hadn't, though, I think that the general fact is that it's much easier to create problems quickly than to fix them quickly, so that the idea that any administration, even a 2-term one with a hypothetical cooperative Congress, could undo such changes (as opposed to just starting to undo them) isn't plausible—or, if it could be done, then it would surely be as all-consuming of political capital as the ACA was, at the expense of pursuing any of that administration's other priorities—and being able to pursue a longer-term solution would require electoral patience with political promises that weren't accompanied by immediate delivery.
Alas, I don't remember what specific thing they were discussing.
The 1980s was a huge inflection point for our economy overall. It was the beginning of the baby boom. The end of Bretton Woods was just being felt. Instantaneous international markets were a thing for the first time.
You can pull as many threads as you want to make the case that it all points to the minutia of a single administration - but they just happened to be at the wheel when the tide was changing.
Which baby boom are you talking about?
The baby boom was 50s and 60s, so late 80s is when they started working and consuming things.