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This is just the result of ongoing momentum. Most projects do not come to real life fruition for 5-10 years, so if a President starts a policy the day he comes into office, you might start to notice impacts at the end of his first term, and if it takes him until year two to start the project you'll barely notice it until the end of his second. If, as has been the case for many projects since Reagan, a single party/faction/project fails to capture the presidency for two terms and a successor then before the impacts of a project won't come to fruition until supporters of the other party/faction/project come into power, mitigating or preventing those impacts from occurring.
What you're seeing as stasis, it doesn't matter if the Republicans or the Democrats are in office, is the experience of sitting just above high tide and saying it doesn't matter if the tide comes in or out. You'd know fast if the tide kept coming, if the waters kept rising. There is a lot of activity, but never happened.
So one doesn't really notice a lifetime that runs Bush I -- Clinton -- Bush II -- Obama -- Trump -- Biden; but a very different world if it went Bush I -- Dole -- Bush II -- McCain -- JEB!; or if it went Clinton -- Gore -- Obama -- Clinton II. Trump doesn't really fit either way.
The conflict and the chaos produces the stasis.
I’d be kind of curious how much the initiatives you mentioned actually change things and how we’d distinguish the government initiatives from ordinary market changes or social changes that would happen either way and just happen to coincide with X years after Y initiative. I have a personal hypothesis that of the three, political organization is the least powerful. Economic innovation, new technology, and new social norms seem to have just as much if not more power to make things happen. I think most of the success of gay marriage had less to do with anything the government actually did and more to do with social changes that changed how people thought about the issue than anything the government did. New technology probably has more to do with improvements over the last five or ten years than any the President or congress did. New business innovations or new products change your life a lot as well.
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