I’ve been struck lately, especially in response to some of my posts over the last week with how conservatives and libertarians have this irrational fear of the Left.  I say irrational because the left has no power.  The idea that the Left poses any threat to the power structure of this country is an absurd abstraction, a bogeyman of the mind that  no reality.  If it is a threat, where is its power base?  Among college professors and flaky Hollywood types?  The liberal blogosphere?  Your left-leaning friend at the coffee shop with whom you always argue? Think about it–do you really think that any of these is causing America’s power elite to lose sleep at night?

The power base for a progressive agenda used to lie with big labor, but for complex reasons labor is toothless now. It  couldn’t even get the Democrats to say No to NAFTA.  They are as impotent and ineffectual as the offense of the Kansas City Royals.  But this is precisely why we are in danger.  Because there is no organized, well-financed power base on the the left, the right is free to do as it pleases. It’s not about approving the agenda of the left, it’s about having some way to check the agenda of the right. 

That’s why so much of the debate that goes on particularly in Conservative circles strikes me as surreal.  They are so obsessed with the red-herring, abstract threat that the U.S. might become the Soviet Union or Cuba that they don’t see where the real threat lies. Or there is a tendency to see that what’s going on in Washington right now is just politics as usual.  Things swing back and forth.  The GOP had its day, and now it looks like they’ve screwed things up enough, so we’ll give the Dems a chance, and so it goes, swinging back and forth between the parties in this infinitely tedious two-step to nowhere.

But I think that underestimates the movement conservatives who really do have a long-term strategy for returning the country to the good old days before government regulation, income taxes, and social safety net programs. If you don’t think this is what’s going on since at least since 1980, I think you’re just bought the GOP propaganda narrative.  They want you to believe that nothing much is going on–that they are just making some common sense adjustments to the system to stimulate the economy or to make the government less intrusive.

A big part of their strategy is to make the Democratic party as impotent as the Republican Party was in the South in the post-reconstruction era.  The Southern oligarchs were able to keep the rank-and-file whites in line by playing to their tribal resentment of Yankee Republican elites.  And they played the race card to implement a divide-and-conquer strategy that insured that poor whites would never see that their interests lay with the interests of  poor blacks who, if they could, voted Republican because it was the party of Lincoln.  This strategy pretty much insured that Democrats always won.

In other words the Southern Democrats were able to maintain a virtual one-party system in the South by keeping the conversation off of power and money and on issues relating to tribal identity. There was the rare loose cannon, like Huey Long, who was able to break ranks, but for the most part the Southern one-party system ran like a well oiled machine, and Republicans were there for window dressing to give the appearance that democracy was happening, but elections were as rigged and predictable as elections in Mexico.

Now it’s clear to me that the GOP is now using a similar tribal identity strategy in their promotion of the culture wars since the 90s to achieve exactly the same effect.  People vote for the people who present themselves as members of their tribe and trust that they will do the right thing.  That’s the nature of the con. And the whole point is to keep you distracted in your living room talking about cultural values while their cronies are robbing your kitchen, bedrooms, and garage. 

The disarray of the Democrats has given Karl Rove, the man with the plan, as his protege Bush calls him, an historic opportunity which he has so far effectively exploited.  Rove realizes that the Dems are toothless and has done everything he can to make sure they stay that way.  He has made them appear weak and pathetic,  and for the  most part they haven’t given the American electorate reason to think otherwise.

The Dems are easy not to take seriously, and they will continue to be. They are well on their way to becoming for the early 21st Century on the national level what the 20th century Republican party was in the reconstruction south.  Why? Because they have no compelling hold on the American electorate’s imagination.  They are a laundry list of social entitlement programs without any compelling narrative or mythos to counter the very powerful, fear motivated mythos of the Right. 

This is why I think that even if they are successful in taking back congress this fall, they will still largely be ineffectual. But it’s precisely the impotence of the Democrats that puts the country in danger.  It’s not about some rational evaluation of the relative merits of the Democrats or the Republicans; it’s about resistance to the right-wing corruption of the political process.  That’s the only thing that matters now.

I’d like to believe that this disastrous administration would expose and discredit the engineers of this GOP strategy once and for all, but it’s clear that even if this  GOP strategy suffers a setback in the coming elections, it will be back, and it will build on the foundation that it has already laid for a corporation-dominated, crony-capitalist system to flourish for years into the future. 

Little about that will change if the Dems take office again.  They haven’t the power base to effect any changes in it, and the DLC branch of the the Dems is actually quite comfortable with the system as it has been corrupted.  The Democrats at best represent a No to the excesses of GOP, but not a Yes which inspires a robust counter program that most Americans will feel any enthusiasm.

And so we live in a country now where those with wealth and power are pretty much free to impose their will without fear of being checked, and the rest of us go along, either because, like the Libertarians, we think fatalistically that whatever the markets want the markets should get. Or like those of us who would resist, we have no power–and are for the most part dismissed as flakes who are making a mountain out of a molehill. And we’re accused of fomenting class warfare.  But as Barbara Ehrenreich says,  "Yes, there’s a class war. It’s totally one-sided and it’s time for the rest of us to mobilize against the aggressors."