Don’t expect a quick victory over the plutocrats who have gained control over our government, our media, and our culture. They have unlimited money and the unlimited power that money commands to take over your lives, your fortune and even your minds. Their strategy and their plans have always been with us as byproducts of their grasping ways, but only since the 1970s and 1980s have their tactics paid big dividends, enlisting recruits at an early age with their almost unlimited reach.

If you doubt the reach, the relentless energy, the money and the resources behind radical right-wing strategy and its thinking, look at the early development of one of its creations, the highly intelligent (Rafael Edward) Ted Cruz. It is no accident that he makes headlines with his unabashed rash behavior as a freshman Senator, making up facts as he goes along. Like other right-wingers, it’s Machiavellian – his ends are worthy of the lies, the rancor, the insults, and the bombast he exhibits.

The Senate, like any forum, is now the plaything of other older Republicans like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, both grandstanding clowns, and the old obstructer, Mitch McConnell. These buffoons play courtly comity in the Senate by the old rules. Cruz doesn’t, but conservatives intend that he – with the Rand Paul’s and Marc Rubio’s — will inherit the spoils left by old conservatives like McCain, McConnell, Graham, Kyl, and DeMint.

Unlike the older GOP dogs which came by right-wing conservatism late, Cruz had early schooling, when his mind was fertile and more impressionable. His conservative baptism came at 13, when his parents enrolled him in an after-school program in Houston, run by a local nonprofit called the Free Enterprise Education Center. Its founder was a retired natural gas executive (and onetime vaudeville performer) named Rolland Storey. He was a jovial septuagenarian, actually a libertarian whose program inculcated those beliefs in his young charges. He talked limited government and free enterprise, that is, as long as that government did the bidding of what he called “free enterprise.”

Now the Tom Cruz’s are the current stepchildren of a movement that has borrowed a form of the Machiavellian code. That code plays in whatever developing forum that plutocrats can create or control — government, media, workplace, and entertainment.

McCarthyite Cruz’s current forum is the US Senate in which he is a partisan minority, but a minority which has effective majority power because the old guard, Mitch McConnell, uses every rule at his disposal to block the Senate from working. Harry Reid continues to make this possible by foolishly respecting the gentlemanly rules of the Senate with a meaningless “filibuster” handshake with “chinless” McConnell.

But the right-wing movement is resourceful and flexible. As a minority in the Senate, they have had the means to continually chip away the Consumer Financial Protection Board, for example, so that their buddies in Wall Street can prevail over Main Street. But when the obstruction of government no longer works, they have other methods for controlling the debate and the government.

They control gerrymandering in states where billionaire money bought state government. This ensures control of the House of Representatives. Union busting and voter suppression is developing quite well in these states while their Supreme Court conservatives seem to be set to strike down the Voter’s Rights Act provision that limits voter restrictions. Huge corporations control the media, and eventually big money (made possible by the Citizen’s United ruling of their Supreme Court) can make the difference in the Senate and presidential races.

Democrats are not blameless. Most Democratic leaders (Obama, Reid, and Pelosi) spew the middle class rhetoric but pull their punches against pro-rich Republicans, not wanting to cross too harshly policies that their rich contributors favor — contributors who aren’t middle class.

The door is left open for Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marc Rubio to join other right-wing trainees to lead the charge against democracy, sporting a shrinking middle class, gutted benefits, privatized government, and a privileged one percent. Of course, it will still be called a democracy. All regimes do that.

This is not a nightmare. This could be reality. When you wake up from your prolonged slumber, you may think it’s only a bad dream.