As predicted the Democratic Party lost control of the House of Representatives, have a smaller majority in the Senate, and lost many governorships. The election results are widely viewed as a major setback for that party, with even President Obama calling it a ‘shellacking’, so why do I think it was a good night for them? For reasons that I outline below and elaborated on in a post at the beginning of this year, this post-election situation will be less embarrassing for them than one in which they control both houses of Congress and the White House.

As I have said repeatedly, the US is a one-party system with two factions, labeled Republican and Democratic. This one party serves the interests of an increasingly rapacious elite that seeks to divert more and more wealth from the public good for their private benefit, and the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic factions seeks to accommodate them. This agenda is profoundly anti-democratic and thus must be covert and is never publicly articulated. One has to infer the existence of this agenda from the fact that since 1980, there has been a steady and massive shift in the income and wealth distribution of this country towards a small elite, irrespective of which party controlled the branches of government, and this could only occur because of policies that both parties collude to create.

The two factions differ on some social issues (abortion, gays, religion, guns, immigration, race, etc.) and it tends to be these issues that are publicly discussed, often at great volume. Each faction also talks in vague terms about jobs and taxes and trade and cutting spending, but never in terms specific enough that one can pin them down to any specific policy proposal. Each party leadership feeds their factional base with rhetoric they do not really support just in order to keep them in line and voting for them, but hopes that they will not have to actually implement them. They try to meet their party supporters’ demands as minimally as possible, but for this strategy to work, they need plausible excuses for why they keep failing to follow through on their promises.

For the Democrats, winning the presidency and big majorities in the House and Senate in 2008 was embarrassing because their supporters now expected them to actually carry out their promises for major health care reform such as a single payer system, wind down the two wars, close down Guantanamo, reverse the trend towards a national security state with all its concomitant violations of the constitutional protections of basic liberties, and so on. The Democratic leadership clearly had no intention of doing any of these things and had to try and deflect blame by pointing to the Republican use of the Senate filibuster rules to explain their failure. But their supporters were not impressed, rightly suspecting that appealing to this arcane and self-imposed rule of the Senate was merely an excuse for a lack of will, and that a forceful president and party would have been able to find ways to circumvent it. After all, George W. Bush never had such control of Congress and yet he managed to get his favored policies passed.

Obama and the Democratic Party, rather than being apologetic about their lack of progress, then deliberately and publicly denigrated their core supporters, the very people who put them into power in 2008, as being ungrateful and having unrealistic expectations, thus further dampening their enthusiasm. Is it any wonder that there was a so-called ‘enthusiasm gap’ between supporters of the two parties when it came to voting? Ted Rall calls this Democratic Party strategy ‘political suicide’.

My main regret with the elections was the defeat of Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, the sole Senator to vote against the infamous USA PATRIOT Act, passed in the wake of 9/11, that is responsible for many of the abuses of basic rights and liberties that we now see. That was an act of political courage and history will place him alongside Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, who were the only senators who resisted being steamrolled into approving the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 that President Lyndon Johnson then exploited to expand the Vietnam war.

Now that the Democrats have lost control of the House, they can more comfortably repudiate their supporters and capitulate to the oligarchy’s agenda, all the while saying that now they truly lack the power to carry out their supporters’ wishes and thus must compromise with their Republican opponents. This is exactly what Bill Clinton did in 1994, selling out his party’s supporters after losing control of both houses of Congress. Clinton handily won re-election in 1996 and I expect Obama to do the same in 2012, because he can blame the Republican-led house for his inability to achieve anything meaningful.

The Republican Party leadership also faces a similar challenge. They don’t really care about cutting spending or balancing the budget or paring down the debt or increasing jobs, the things they sold to their supporters as key issues. What they want to do, like the Democrats, is cater to the very wealthy even if the country goes broke in the process. They will try and sell their tea party supporters the idea that it was because they do not control the Senate and the presidency that they could not carry out their wishes. How well the tea partiers react to this inevitable betrayal will be interesting to observe.

The main difference between Republican Party rule and Democratic Party rule is that the former will bring the country to fiscal ruin faster and is more openly callous about the harm they inflict on the poor and middle class in their desire to serve the rich. The Democrats do it more slowly and with more hand wringing about how sad it all is. Although the Democrats can stop Republican House initiatives either in the Senate or with a presidential veto, I suspect that they won’t do that with issues that benefit the oligarchy, so the only achievements of the next Congress will be those things that serve the interests of the oligarchy, and these will be done quietly and with little fuss.

Next: So what should we watch for in the coming months?