The latest GOP spin is that the party won a great victory in the trumped-up battle over the debt ceiling because, in the words of one Republican appartchik, now being repeated endlessly in blogs across the Intertubes, "Republicans only control one half of one third of the federal government, but the American people agree with us."
Oh, really?
Actually, the GOP is now a very odd duck: It is a minority -- even fringe -- party, in terms of lack of support for its policies by majorities of voters in polling. Yet in traditional terms it seemingly forever remains or verges on being a minority party in terms of national elective office. Despite that, it continues to wield significant power.
How can this be, and why would the party describe itself otherwise? Because Republicans like to pretend theirs is a besieged, victimized, populist movement of upstarts and revolutionaries, rather than what it mostly continues to be: an elite, privileged party of plutocrats. Fact is, the GOP's electoral and judicial strength remains vast, and so does its ability -- thanks in part to increasing ruthlessness and recklessness -- to shape and even warp public opinion. Of course, burning the village in order to save it was the first clue that the US military was going to lose in Vietnam, too.
This inquiry into the way Republicans maintain power even when they're nominally powerless says a lot about the limitations on progressive politics and social change that our political system has evolved -- limitations that affect everyone from Bernie Sanders to relatively conservative blue dog Democrats. Read on:
After all, despite their modest protestation that they're hugely outnumbered, Republicans were just quite successful in obtaining that which they sought. That's because in part they formally control not just part of a third of government but actually one HALF of Congress.
The elephantine party possesses nearly a 50-seat majority in the US House of Representatives, and that means House Democrats are utterly powerless to stop Speaker John Boehner and company from doing anything they like. That's not "half" control, that's full control. The only part of GOP control in the House that's "half" involves its own internal battle between mainstream conservatives and tea party zealots within its own folds.
Meanwhile, Republicans have a WORKING majority in the US Senate, even though they remain in the numerical minority. That's because they have taken extreme advantage of long-standing but not Constitutionally mandated Senate rules that effectively require the true-majority Democrats to have a super-majority of 60 votes, which they are nowhere close to having, at least not without GOP votes. And never mind other arcane Senate rules, like the one where a single GOP lawmaker can completely prevent action on stuff like, you know, confirming Obama judicial appointments.
This in turn means Senate Democrats have to make deals with Republicans in both houses. But as we have just again seen, Republicans don't tend to make deals. They hold out their vote until they get most if not all or in some cases even more than they set out to get. This strategy is not always effective (defeat of health care reform, anyone?), but it's often effective, especially when GOP intransigence threatens to cause great harm to public policy making, faith in good government, the budget, and other treasured American notions.
And so, actually, the Republicans can be seen at present to have a working majority of TWO THIRDS of the federal government -- that is, if you're only counting Congress and the White House.
But even that's too modest a way to characterize GOP power, because it is a way that completely ignores the judiciary, where Republican conservatives by and large dominate, all the way up to the US Supreme Court. Obama-era and Clinton-era nomination blocking by Republicans continues to help perpetuate that conservative bias in our courts.
So to be more accurate, Republicans have literal or working control of two of the three entire BRANCHES of government -- both chambers of the legislative branch and the judiciary but not the White House.
But even that is not fully reflective of reality, because it doesn't count the so-called "fourth estate" of government -- namely, the press, where fat cat publishers, conservative columnists and liberal-averse or shy-of-balance editors, news directors and even reporters abound. Add in this additional GOP advantage and it's far more accurate to say the GOP controls three of the four "estates" of modern American society.
Yet even that measure fails to account for blue dog Democrats, many of whom are functional conservatives, which effectively extends the GOP stranglehood even farther.
And just to pile on the hurtful truth, let's not even get into GOP dominance in statehouses around the country. True, it's a circumstance largely born out of economic troubles since 2000, as magnified by the 2007 financial meltdown nationwide. So in that sense this vast GOP statehouse hegemony is probably temporary. But it's there for the moment, and very clearly the GOP is working very hard to parlay its temporary hegemony into something more permanent, even if that goes against the grain of suddenly fickle political sentiment.
Yet these very same Republicans still continue to pretend they are an outmatched, outspent, aggrieved minority that's working for the interests of average, mainstream Americans.
The silver lining is that, despite overriding functional control, Republicans still had to fight tooth and nail -- effectively threatening world economic collapse and taking the US economy hostage in the process -- in order to extract a good measure of their demands in the debt ceiling emergency (which wasn't really about the debt ceiling, and which wasn't an emergency).
So, the real wonder -- and I realize I'm going against the grain here compared to the views of many of my progressive friends -- is that Republicans achieved so little relative to their power, and took such a big public opinion hit in the doing. Of course, from the GOP perspective, anything that serves to cast further doubt or outright disdain upon government benefits their party, because they're the party that ultimately claims it's against government, an emotional hot button that is of considerable voltage these days.
This analysis won't be enough salve to cure the progressives who again have been burned by their own party, but it is worth considering not just what Democrats have failed to achieve, but what they have accomplished despite huge obstacles. Democrats and especially progressives need to have much greater than mere majority representation in government before plutocrats seeking yet another boon can routinely be stymied.
Because when everything is nominally split pretty much down the middle, inertia has a built-in advantage, and that means status quo at best, backsliding at worst. Fuzz up the issues with sideshows and mean words, and conservatives are able to hold off even a growing progressive army; not stop that army forever, but keep it at bay while they parlay their winnings and consider their next sleight of hand.
So sit back and consider just how steep our cilmb is, and how much Democrats with progressive prodding actually have been able to achieve despite formidable resistance from the Reckless-ican Party. Democratic ennui doesn't help, but that's not the root cause of this latest political outcome. It's those ponderous pachyderms who are highly visible and refuse to be budged, even though they're already an endangered species.