People who don't see the republicans for what they are is pretty bizarre to me. We have a two party system. Which one do you think you could have an impact on?
I think it is you not paying attention if you haven't noticed yet that Democrats and Republicans are nearly the same and equally blunderous and corrupted. They both support war, surveillance, mass incarceration, mass deportation, drug prohibition, and more. Barack Obama was a terrible president, so much so that I'm not sure even Trump will do worse. At least Trump seems to attract more scrutiny.
I get your gripe with the GOP. We all do. But your posts don't have much depth or add anything new to the discussion.
What I meant by the last line of my comment, is that the Republicans are willing to do some really bad stuff to the least powerful among us in service of their ideals. It isn't going to effect you and me. It's going to effect the people that clean my building. There are more issues on the table than mass surveillance. If you ally with the Republicans on this issue you empower them on those issues. We need strategies to break the Republican party, that can only be done by a massive coordinated defeat and then causing irreparable fissures between their coalitions.
On the other hand you have the party who rigged their primaries to ensure that their neoconservative warhawk could be elected. Which one do you think you could have an impact on?
From a federal government perspective, the intelligence community is a tool; it's not a terminal goal (where I think one party is obviously more reasonable than the other), it's an intermediate step to achieving terminal goals. Neither party seems interested in restricting their power (even to restrict the power of their opponents) or to give a damn about the incidental harms caused by surveillance tools.
This is why I get so irritated by the argument that mechanical approaches to privacy are techno-solutionism. The same people pursuing strong encryption lead the political fight, but they're viciously opposed by both parties. On surveillance, anything resembling the political establishment in either party has proved utterly immovable.
You are right, the foreign policy elites in both parties are largely homogenous. That being said, I don't think that it's possible to build a coalition with the Republicans that doesn't betray something else that you hold dear. I think that you have a better chance of building a coalition inside the democratic party that can move the center of power away from the foreign policy elites.