This week we have made a lot of progress in getting at the underlying logic of the conservative state. We have discussed the massive differences between the way conservatives talk and the way they rule, the damage they have wreaked in those branches of the state they dislike, and the means by which they have handed off public responsibilities to private companies.

We have also expressed a lot of frustration with the powerlessness of journalists or bloggers to get these things into the debate all on our own. The points we have been raising need to be made, not just by cranky scribblers like me, and not even by expert observers like Dean and Danielle, but by social movements and ultimately by political leaders. The public desperately needs to know why it is that the government built to protect them has been transformed into a mechanism for their exploitation--why government repeatedly failed during the Bush years at projects both great and small--why industry has been able to capture government so easily.

Back before the crash, I used to talk about the need for president Obama to appoint, on day one of his administration, a commission to investigate the entire history of privatization and outsourcing. After all, the movement to hand over government to private industry got its start, after all, in the Reagan-era Grace Commission, which promoted privatization as a way to save money and reduce the deficit. Now we need a verdict: Did outsourcing really save us money? Did it help us to get things done more efficiently? Or did we simply come up with a new method for sluicing the public's billions into the pockets of the best-connected contractors?

Unless every poll in America is wrong, an Obama administration is today an almost certain prospect, but the crisis has deepened so dramatically in the last few weeks that conservative governance stands before us discredited now in nearly every particular. We need investigations into so many things now: All the different layers of the subprime lending fiasco, the deregulation of financial markets, the wholesale capitulation of federal agencies to the industries they're supposed to be overseeing.

I know, I know: we're supposed to be all bipartisan and noble and forgiving in our triumph. We're supposed to let bygones be bygones. But that's not the way the other side plays the game, and that's not the way to build a lasting movement. Unless we close the debate with the conservatives now, they will simply be back in four years, screeching once again about the poor disrespected real Americans of the heartland--and using the power of the state to reward their class allies even more richly.

One of the themes I emphasize in The Wrecking Crew is the conservative quest for permanence. Not in the Karl Rove "permanent majority" sense, but in the larger effort to make conservative changes irreversible; to take liberal options off the table for good. There have been dozens of efforts from the right along these lines, some successful, some not, but one massive change that undergirds all the others: The remaking of our egalitarian nation into a new-model plutocracy.

We all know the statistics: How some tiny percentage of the population makes as much as everyone else combined, how that one guy made $3 billion last year, or how Bill Gates's fortune, transformed into gold, would outweigh all the ships of all the navies of the NATO nations. (Okay, I made that last one up.)

This is the ultimate product of conservative governance, it is something that government has done very effectively, and it is also, unless we challenge it, the gravitational force that will continue to pull our country to the right for years to come.

Undoing that plutocracy, and putting out country back on the path to social democracy, is the paramount task of the next few decades. The catastrophic collapse of the financial system has not only made such an effort possible, it has made it a necessity.