I think more like 70 years at this point. It's been SOP for the conservatives to get elected to govern, make government worse at every turn while enriching themselves and their friends, and then turning around to the public and being like "look how badly this works, clearly we need to cut taxes since it isn't working" and rinse and repeat until every institution in the world is borderline non-functioning.
It was Jimmy Carter and not Ronald Reagan who scrapped the civil service competency exams. Government getting worse has been a two-party affair for quite some time. No one has any incentive to fix it, and the system is so vast, so complex, and so self-serving that no one even has the power to fix it (as things stand).
The Democrats in America are highly conservative. Not as conservative as the Republicans, but still very conservative. We don't have a left and a right here, we have a hard right and a center right.
Certain "hard right" parties like the PAP in Singapore and the LDP in Japan have placed a competent civil service at the forefront of their policies. Though in many ways, the US may appear more conservative than its "peers", in other ways, it appears more liberal.
