The disease was probably unavoidable. It is caused by wealth and prosperity. The nation has grown so wealthy that it has long supported two deleterious classes of nonproducers. One is the welfare class of gimmedats and the other is the academic/MSM/trustfunder/public union class of mostly intelligent people who have time and sufficient lack of perspective and historical knowledge to dream up utopias and the time and wherewithal to force their fantasies on to the productive portion of society that can't resist effectively because, as producers, they work for a living and don't have the time to demonstrate constantly and en masse nor do they notice the resulting creeping bureaucratic totalitarianism until it has almost swamped them and it is too late. They are two busy producing. It is too late when the schools have inculcated dependence and statism into several generations of children, three quarters of a century of creeping takeover of the schools and at least 35 years of pretty much total control by the people with too much time on their hands who are puppets of those who aim for total power and riches for themselves.
We could elect Trump and he could EO all the agencies out of existence and balance the budget thereby and it would all still tend toward a grey socialist future because of the immense population of people who can conceive of no other way than dependency and if the society becomes superprosperous again because of business taxes and most regulation being swept away then there is that problem of the drones in rich societies throwing sand into the gears all over again, this time more quickly, because we don't start with a small population of freedom minded independent producers. We still have that 50 or more % drones in a large population.