Digging myself out of despair

Liberal commentators are celebrating several major legislative successes the Democrats achieved during the lame duck session that just ended.  But I can't help feeling that they're missing the point.  I tend to think that by failing to pass the Fair Elections Now Act or even the DISCLOSE Act in those last few weeks, Congress has signed the death warrant of our democracy.  Those bills were our last chance to blunt the power of the "Citizens United" decision, which has given corporations such vast influence over our electoral process that we will never again be able to unite as citizens to elect a Congress or a President willing to challenge that influence (or so I imagine).

From now on, the vast majority of elections will be won by people like Rep. Darrell Issa, who honestly believe that doing corporations' bidding is the essence of principled policymaking.  Regulations that protect workers, consumers, children, and other living things will be ruthlessly eliminated, labor unions will be outlawed, vast monopolies will go unchallenged until their power far outstrips that of the federal government, and the combined corporate and government voices pushing global-warming denial will drown out all reason, even as Alaska continues to melt and increasingly terrible droughts, floods, and wildfires sweep the landscape.  Finally, somewhere around the year 2050, the corporatocracy will collapse along with the rest of civilization, leaving a few survivors to eke out a torturous existence in a world ravaged by war and climate catastrophe.

I'm well aware that the above predictions stem mainly from mindless despair rather than reasoned analysis, and I invite you to poke as many holes in them as you can.  Here are the ones I've tried so far:

• There is probably a point of diminishing returns when you pour more and more money into political campaigns.  Is there any amount of attack ads or phone banking that could save the Republicans if they're in charge when the next big economic crisis hits?  Maybe not.  After all, a political movement that sees government as largely parasitic is probably not very well positioned to stamp out the age-old political battle cry, "Throw the bums out!"
• Likewise, conservatives want to limit government power largely because they see politicians as inevitably corrupt.  Thus, maybe some Republicans can be shamed into supporting the Other 98% Campaign's Fight Washington Corruption Pledge.  (This one isn't very convincing.)
• Even if America does become an outright corporatocracy, the rise of Chinese and European power means that we can't necessarily doom the world all by ourselves.
• Not all major corporations are conservative.  Many pay more than lip service to the idea of the Triple Bottom Line.  Working Assets, Patagonia, REI, Organic Valley, Whole Foods, and Gaiam are probably all good examples.  Students at top liberal-arts schools these days are notoriously, well, liberal; many of them will go on to become CEOs long before they grow old and cynical, this being the Internet era.  If this represents enough of an upward trend, maybe corporate rule won't be so bad after all.  (Then again, it takes an awful lot of Patagonias to outweigh an Exxon-Mobil.)
• We have advertising clout on our side, too, as the Hopenhagen and 4 Years Go campaigns attest.
• Lots of sustainable technologies are already in the pipeline, and many of them are not going to be abandoned just because a conservative government lets certain tax credits and other incentives expire.