Speaking as someone who for better or worse has been in this business for nearly 30 years now, it's my considered observation that left-wing Democratic voters simply don't have the self-discipline necessary to pull that off. I mean, they can't even by counted on to vote in the mid-terms, never mind organize, engage and sustain a revolutionary movement.

Crazy as Republicans are nowadays, guess what? They show up to vote. It doesn't matter if it's only for a special election to fill a vacancy on a district school board, they're right there, standing in line for their turn to exercise the franchise. That's the sort of commitment which wins elections.

If you really want to see change, then you have to literally embody that change. That requires personal commitment and discipline on your part to see that it through to fruition at your own local level. And that's never going to happen, if the best you can do is get jacked up every four to eight years, whenever some starry-eyed messiah has launched his quixotic candidacy for the White House.

The Louis Gohmerts, Joni Ernsts, Ted Cruzes and Marsha Blackburns of the world didn't just parachute into their congressional chairs on Capitol Hill one fine day. They first gained their political footholds in our village and city councils, county boards and state legislatures.

And in no small number of instances, crackpots like them get elected to office because a lot of Democrats couldn't be bothered to show up on Election Day -- or if they did, didn't concern themselves with down-ticket races. (See "2016 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election.")

So, if you really and truly want to put an end to the right-wing cuckoo that's presently plaguing us, then you need to see to it that it's strangled in its infancy in your own community, and not wait until it's metastasized, spread to Washington and taken root on Capitol Hill.

Showing up only sporadically in support of long-shot presidential prospects like Eugene McCarthy, Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders just isn't going to cut it, because hard truth be told, there are no white knights in politics.

There's only you and your own vote, which you should wield often and wisely to effect change within your own community. Because as the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill once observed, all politics is local.