A society exercising local decisions given limited choices can find optimum solutions. A society with central administration juggling hundreds of variables for each decision (social policy, economics, Congresscritters' appetites) will be a shambles at every scale of implementation. The USSR was doomed from the start; Washington ever more passionately seeks a death spiral.
The Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services are mathematically constrained to fail. Abominable Neanderthal Drill Instructors on Parris Island will succeed. A kinder, gentler armed forces with girls and benign, fairly administered procedures is a hopeless farce.
Fair business practices obeying multiple layers of reportage, regulation, affirmative social policies, and union negotiation wither and die. Monomaniacal robber barons succeed. Mighty, huge, and politically complex Imperial Rome fell to small bands of simpleton barbarians, each a one-man show. The Balkans are a disorganized bloodbath stable for 1000 years against every invader; the US is shaken to its core by the loss of two buildings (and still upchucking tens of $billions/year for "homeland security" seven years later).
The solution to complex multi-variable social, economic, and political problems is not compromise. It cannot be compromise. It can never be compromise even in principle. Any attempt at compromise is a long voyage into wrong answers where traveling more is drowning deeper. Accomplishment is the exclusive providence of narrowly focussed individuals.
1900s education worked because it was simple and direct. Every wretched immigrant kid learned English reading, English writing, and arithmetic without choice in buildings that were hardly more than shacks. Education in the 21st century is a dysfunctional bleeding ulcer not because we are not doing enough, spending enough, or lack compassion. Public education is a bleeding ulcer specifically because we are pursuing all those things with maximum vigor and budget in carpeted air-conditioned audio-visual multi-cultural pleasure domes for our delicate Adderall-gulping children. If public education is about anything but the narrowest least complex vision of education, it will fail.
The Constitution grants broad undifferentiated swaths of individual rights, limitations upon State incursion, and then shuts up. Massive waves of immigration arrived on American shores and became part of the American dream one generation later. Actively interventionist centrally administered social policy since President Johnson's Great Society sought to please everybody. It created a nation of two working parents, shattered families, intractable slums, hyphenated Americans, and multi- lingual ballots. Lose the hyphens and locally target simple goals, or the closed N-hyperball will swallow you and shrink to a point. CRUNCH. Mathematics is implacable.
As for Liberalism, social engineering, social activism, social advocacy, rights movements, peace movements, the United Nations... their failure is a necessity not an annoyance.
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." Richard Feynman.