Rutherford B. Hayes believed the US was a corporatocracy.

Larry Lessig has been arguing since before the internet that the ownership class (including corporations and their lobbyists) get their legislature passed where the public does not. Representatives do not change how they vote according to the demands of the voters.

Reagan opened up Washington to lobbies and special interest groups. Before that, paying off your representative to pass legislation (or block it) was considered bribery and was an imprisonable offense.

So by Citizens United the federal and state governments were intrinsically corrupt.

Of course it was, but it was MUCH more difficult for them. It is disingenuous to pretend that Citizens United didn't exacerbate an already bad situation.

In reality, there were two historical moments that changed the timeline: 1) RFK's assassination, which allowed Nixon to become president and took us down the Dark Republican path that led to MAGA, and 2) The 1974 Tax Code re-write, that first baked Trickle Down Economics into the tax code, created the Oligarch class, and gave them the disposable money to fund political manipulation.

It certainly made it easier, though.

But you have hit upon the problem: We have an oligarch problem primarily. Way more than we have a party problem. Or rather, solving the billionaire problem would be the necessary first step before we are able to solve the party problem. We have many other problems like fascist propaganda, which also need fixing. We're pretty fucked. But overturning Citizens United will certainly help. Not solve. Help.

Honestly, I think this is overblown at this point. We're seeing now that giant ad budgets, while helpful, are not some silver bullet. El-Sayed was massively outspent by Stevens.

What people miss is that there is a certain saturation point for ad dollars. The parties love to spend as much money as possible, as the consultant class takes a cut of everything. But we're seeing now that mass TV ad spend just isn't what it used to be. You can persuade some people that way, but once everyone knows your name and general message, each dollar you spend is less and less effective.

The point is that in these big races, we can probably get 90% of the effect with 20% of the budget. This allows candidates to fund their campaigns mostly with small-dollar donations. You only need to take oligarch money if you want to have the massive ad spend.

And taking oligarch money has electoral consequences. We can't run populist left candidates. We have to run extremely unpopular centrist corporate candidates. They have to carefully choose all their policies to not offend their wealthy donors. The only hope this type of candidate has is through massive ad spending. But if we simply run more popular candidates, the need for ads is low enough that campaigns can be funded by small dollar donors and mass boots-on-the-ground voter outreach. Unpopular candidates also have trouble getting people passionate enough to volunteer their time for the ground game.