I don't think this is strictly accurate. The 20th century was rife with problems we failed to address (in part or in total).

• Lead and Asbestos were rolled out despite their known hazards and were never properly cleaned up
• Our nuclear weapons stockpile is as big a threat as its ever been. We never really solved the problem of nuclear waste disposal, either, so we've just got these cesspools congealing in spots around the country.
• Aggressive industrial agriculture has drained a number of major aquifiers, while industrial fishing and ocean dumping has obliterating the native marine population
• Oil spills plague us to this day, utterly despoiling major riverways and polluting the Gulf of ~~Mexico~~ America at record rates.
• De-industrialization has stripped much of the Midwestern interior of economic activity, plunging the region into poverty
• The Oxycontin/Heroin/Fentanyl epidemic only gets worse with every passing decade and the only response we seem capable of initiating is "more cops!"

What we've seen over the last 40 years hasn't been a steady series of policy wins nearly so much as a consolidation of media into the hands of a small corporately controlled cartel. It isn't that computer bugs and food shortfalls and environmental catastrophes and even outright genocides aren't happening. Its just that we've decided to stop talking about each of them in turn, as the public loses control of its independent information streams.

Most Americans have lived in a largely functioning democracy for so long they don’t really comprehend that it’s possible for America to not be as it is.

Point to the decade in which America had a "largely functioning democracy".

Was it during the 60s, when it was open season on civil rights leaders and populist presidents? Was it the 70s, when the Nixonian War on Crime/Drugs stripped millions of Americans from the voting rolls through felony disenfranchisement? Was it the Reagan Era, of brutal police violence and race riots and MOVE bombings and the FBI/CIA in open war with anyone to the left of Tip O'Neale? Was it Clinton's 90s and the disaster capitalism that forced a wildly unpopular series of international trade deals with the intent of dismantling trade unions? Was it the Bush War On Terror, with its blacksites and misinformation campaigns and endless wars? How about Obama's bank bailouts followed by the GOP spearheaded 2010 gerrymanders that packed and cracked state and federal legislatures nationwide?

Where's this democracy I keep hearing all about? I'm 40 years old and I struggle to point to a moment in my life when this country ever felt like more than a White Dude's Caliphate.