According to columnist Eric Alterman, prominent journalists tend to realize that most Republicans are “ideological extremists” whose agenda, dictated by “the super-wealthy,” warps our politics. The problem, he added, is that the news stories those journalists write don’t reflect that realization.

Instead, argued Alterman in a piece for the magazine’s May 18 issue, “even our best reporters feel the need to put forth a fairy-tale narrative in which the United States enjoys a fully functioning democracy…When you consider that far-right billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and Charles and David Koch have the power to demand that presidential aspirants pledge fealty to their ideological preferences and financial interests, the notion that our laws represent the collective will of the American people appears comical at best.”

The left-liberal magazine The Nation has just published its 150^th-anniversary issue, which includes Alterman’s piece on the state of American conservatism. Alterman makes two main points. One is that conservatives are ideologues, whereas liberals are pragmatists. The other is that prominent righty pundits routinely spew nonsense not because they’re dumb, but because extremist plutocrats control the conservative movement.

“We have allowed conservatives to define the terms of debate at a time when conservatives have lost all sense of moral, intellectual and especially practical responsibility,” opines Alterman. “Today’s conservative intellectuals [are] making calculated attempts to undermine our democracy, exploiting and manipulating a public that has decreasing resources for the kind of reliable information that would lead to a pragmatic ‘liberal’ response. It’s time we woke up to that reality while we still have a country—and a planet—left to save.”