Agreed, but we still need to envision what good legislation would look like and it does occasionally happen.

This kind of idealism is nice, but the truth is that the American government isn’t a computer we can program with just and elegant code. It’s a vending machine we have to pound on and shake until it dispenses not the just outcome we asked for, but whatever imperfect scraps it will give us.

Affirmative action may not have been an elegant way to counterbalance legacy admissions or compensate people who had been wronged, but it was the only thing that came out when we shook the vending machine, and now people have thrown it in the trash and are acting like something better is going to happen.

Unelected and unaccountable people who were appointed for the express purpose of entrenching established wealth and power threw it in the trash.

I think the last pieces of major legislation—laws that involved a regulatory effort* and not just shoveling money around—were in 2010. Dodd-Frank and the ACA. That’s six Congresses ago.

* or deregulatory, I’m not trying to make a partisan point