Reversing Extremism

What appears to be a final conservatard/freakazoid victory is inevitable only if we let it happen without a fight.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

Those of you who read my book on the 2014 midterms might find this argument from the esteemed political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson kind of familiar:

SNIP

They conclude with this sobering thought, which like most of their analysis I would emphatically endorse:

We are under no illusion about how easily or quickly our lopsided politics can be righted. But put yourself in the shoes of an early 1970s conservative and ask how likely the great right migration seemed then, when Richard Nixon was proposing a guaranteed income and national health insurance and backing environmental regulations and the largest expansion of Social Security in its history. Reversals of powerfully rooted trends that threaten our democracy take time, effort, and persistence. Yet above all they require a clear recognition of what has gone wrong.