If the Republican Party has reached hitherto unsurpassed heights of cruelty in its current iteration, the Democratic Party itself is the nurturing and binding element that reconstitutes the republic, smoothing over the worst excesses of the Republican party, and which, in its current state, largely leaves the forces of destruction in place, slowing them down, so as to preserve the system overall.
The Democratic party, unless radically restructured, preserves the springboard from which the Republicans can eventually reach new levels of viciousness altogether. Both parties are forms of abuse on the body politic. And the body politic, unfortunately, largely welcomes it, though not always of its own volition.
If it bears repeating, it is a trap. The current flows of power require that governance is capitalized. The administration of the modern state requires vast arrays of communication and transportation infrastructure for starters, all of which are fed and reproduced by mining, chemical, manufacturing, steelworking, logistical, and petroleum infrastructure, which are fed by and reproduced by communication and transportation infrastructure in turn.
And all of that infrastructure is presided over by various familial dynasties, individuals, and financial structures that are only consolidating further, and becoming more opaque and paranoid about potential loss. And the wealth dynasties are maintained by managerial labor plyed with a motivation for short sighted self-enrichment, a desire mimicked from the captains of industry themselves.
So the election process requires capital. It requires the permission to use vast tissues of machine and electricity, a permission that is won from those motivated only by accumulation, at least in the current paradigm. Good luck restructuring any of it without a fight!
It is also worth saying that this isn't a phenomenon local to the United States, but to the entire industrialized world.
This is a largely banal observation at this point, at least from a radical perspective. But it is worth repeating. It should be a banality on our lips! Perhaps the tired old earworms dispensed by the Rs and Ds can be replaced by another earworm: enough with old and useless paradigms! Though of course inflation exists in the realm of discourse too. Eventually a certain volume of talk edges past illumination; its inflationary forces cheapen it.
Much like money, where increasing volumes of talk no longer have anywhere to go, they curl back on themselves and destroy their own functions, precipitating another phase of crisis.
