In Full House (1996)  Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist to the people, laments the passing of the heady days of multiple .400+ hitters in American baseball.  His explanation for this, resting in a biology text (yeah!), is that creatures in the evolutionary systems they are in (including we self-aware ones) tend to reach a sort of detente of abilities and thus, once pitching caught up to early leads in batting, once the game reached a stasis under the way it was set up, the balance settled in to whatever the modern stats in batting percentages (below .400) and ERAs are.  Outstanding performance (and, to be fair, abnormally extra-shitty performance) is not allowed by such a system (less variance in his terms).  It just is what it is  -- the way baseball is set up, you don't get the badass 400 hitters anymore. You get the usual suspects and their usual results. 

Unless, of course, you change the rules.  All organized sports have committees that, in order not just to address crises but also achieve desired (future) goals, change the dynamics of the game and thus its outcome or value as theater.  My personal favorite is the recent deliberate move to make ice hockey more violent. It works.

We need a rule change in American politics if we ever want another FDR.  Right now any variation towards excellence, towards progress, towards improvement in implementation of the stated goals of our social contract, is beaten in the face by a bully with a stupid citizen stick until it goes back to its dark corner to doubt itself.  FDR was the most confident sonofabitch to grace the DC swamp and that didn't hurt, but now that neoliberalism and its BFF corporate power are arrayed against a hapless or worst citizenry that gets most of its information from its abusers (the same corporations), even FDR, I submit, couldn't get doctors and insurance company luckies to buy fewer Porsches.

Notice in print and blogs that progressives (Nobel-prize winning calm people like Paul Krugman, and the most deliberate considerer of facts to ever blog, Glen Greenwald) are so sad about prospects for the public option that they are turning on the president, questioning his intentions (in a way, just like the wingnut Fox News assholes have always done, but within the realm of earthly possibilities) and backing up their assertions with descriptions of a system that cannot permit what they desire.  They want some variance in a system that allows none.

We cannot have improvements in the United States unless the rules are changed.  And, since we don't know if we have reached the stasis point a la Full House, things may get a lot worse and then stay that way until the rules change.  Only thing we can be sure of is that they are not going to get better.