So it’s not surprising that people are starting to think about ways to break out. In his short, bracing book, “It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics,” David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University, argues that Democrats should immediately use every lever they have to gum up the works in Washington, to ensure they win full control of government in 2020.

Then, they should set about unrigging the system.

To end gerrymandering, Faris says, they should scrap the winner-take-all method we use to elect members of the House and replace it with a system known as “ranked choice voting” that better reflects voter preferences. To fix the problem of Democratic underrepresentation in the Senate, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico should get statehood, and California should be split into seven separate states. Democrats should add seats to the Supreme Court and fill them with progressives. And they should reform voting laws to ban onerous voter ID requirements, re-enfranchise ex-felons and automatically register everyone to vote.

With the exception of the California gambit, which would first need a ballot initiative and an act of the state legislature, all of these ideas could be achieved through normal congressional legislation. There are, of course, some obvious political obstacles. The last Democratic effort to play hardball — a plan to force a government shutdown over the fate of undocumented immigrants brought to America as young people — fizzled when several red-state Democratic senators up for re-election this year got cold feet. It’s hard to imagine those same senators would vote to create a bunch of new blue states.

But Faris’s overriding goal is less to plot out a precise legislative agenda and more to focus attention on the urgency of the crisis. And it’s telling that the only reasonable objections here are practical ones. The idea that we should think twice about this kind of hyperpartisan power grab lest it erode the mutual trust needed for effective government might have been worth entertaining a decade or more ago. Today, with the future of the country and maybe the world on the line, that notion sounds far more absurd than seven Californias.