With 20/20 hindsight I'd say that's the wrong lesson. The actual lesson is that if you're struggling to get 40% of the legislature to make obvious improvements

With 20/20 hindsight I'd say that's the wrong lesson. The actual lesson is that if you're struggling to get 40% of the legislature to make obvious improvements to your country, you should use your majority for even more radical things. If they'd used that same majority to pack the supreme court, pass a nationwide anti-gerrymandering law, break up hundreds of large corporations, and so on, we might have averted a ton of disaster. At the time perhaps it was hard to see, but in retrospect what we saw in the period 2008-2010 were early warning signs of how the flaws in our system of government were going to send us on a downward spiral.