Remember when Obama won? The Republican Party was at a morale nadir, and they rallied together under the banner “1 term president”. They fought every single thing.

Mitt Romney had to oppose his own Medicare plan, which the democrats adopted so that they could find common ground.

Obama winning was probably the last gasp of the system working as it was intended. There are plans upon plans to ensure the system can never do that. That agencies are weakened, courts are stacked, local elections won, media narratives perfected. It’s tempting to say this is to ensure the “libs” lose, but that only plays back into a narrative and camouflages the issue.

Effective, logical government is itself the problem.

I think that someone is paying attention to the details, to the org charts, to the minutiae of laws, and making a coordinated effort to move things in a single direction.

I dont think what you described counts as idealism anymore.

But Obama was still one of a very few options Americans had the opportunity to elect. He ended up in the primaries largely without the involvement of the vast majority of the country. My point isn't that things don't get better, just that we don't get a lot of choices, politically.

(Though if Trump wins this fall, and the right succeeds in their plans for their government "makeover", I think that will set back the "things getting better" train for decades. Hell, our hard-right SCOTUS majority is already unraveling that.)