But even then, I think that this is a six-decade long manifestation of what has been festering in the USA. Republicans tear things down and erode living standards and human rights, and while Democrats are busy trying to preserve or reverse those things which prevents them from working on making things better, Republicans are busy kicking the next thing down, and the cycle continues.

Yes, and another big reason Democrats fail to make things better is because they are too often working from fundamentally incorrect assumptions/towards untenable goals and therefore come up with wrong solutions that don’t work. (They’re often less wrong than Republicans’ assumptions/goals/solutions, but still wrong nevertheless.)

For example, even among Democrats (let alone Republicans) the prevailing notion is that we can somehow eat our cake and have it too when it comes to single-family housing in cities, due to a combination of NIMBY entitlement and oil/car industry corrupting influence. Because of that, they insist on keeping car-dependency baked into the zoning code and then delusionally try to paper over the inevitable spiraling costs with subsidized housing, instead of admitting that the physical geometric reality of space dictates that cities must be walkable in order to be affordable because cars simply don’t fucking fit!