What is the alternative? How can the United States escape this quagmire? There seem to me be two kinds of things that have to happen—one having to do with political movements and the other with structural changes in American politics. Politically, the Republican far right has to be marginalized. That can happen either through ordinary conservative Republicans like Tennessee Senator Bob Corker or California Congressman Devin Nunes bolting the party or by the conservatives and moderates reclaiming control of the party and forcing the far right to create its own party along the lines of the old Dixiecrats or George Wallace’s American Independent Party. In the former case, you would have the emergence of an FDR-strength Democratic majority; in the latter, an Eisenhower era collaboration between the parties…

Equally, if not more important, is the growth of organized business opposition to the radical right. So far, organized business groups have stayed largely on the sidelines. If anything, they have been more inclined to fund Republicans, and some of the very wealthy, often drawn from older extractive industries or fringe financial operations, have backed reactionary groups like the Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity. To withstand the challenge from the radical right, the mainstream business groups would have to target the Republican right with the same fervor and determination that business groups of the early twentieth century targeted the socialist left. Organizations like the Fix the Debt that attempt to blame both sides equally are useless.

Structurally, much of the power of the radical right depends upon two loopholes in American politics that need to be closed. The first are the campaign finance laws, which allow eccentric billionaires like the Koch Brothers or Peter Thiel to exert inordinate influence over American politics. Restoring the McCain-Feingold limits on independent expenditures would help, but what is really needed is a liberal Supreme Court that could overturn Citizens United and the pernicious 1976 ruling Buckley v. Valeo that threw out the 1974 campaign finance law’s effort to limit total spending on individual campaigns. Getting a liberal Supreme Court would require the Democrats’ retention of the White House in 2016 and perhaps even in 2020, and getting it to overturn these laws would mean years of agitation directed at campaign finance reform. It’s no longer simply a good government issue; it’s about the distribution of power in American society.