WS: I think you are mistaking our own weakness for our enemy's strength. What you call "the ruling class" is by no means united - it is amorphous, internally divided, and willing to compromise because deal making is its modus operandi and its raison d'etre. The fact that it gets pretty much what it wants is owed not as much to its own power, albeit this power is non trivial, but the incredible weakness of its class enemies.
The weakness of the Left (which I understand broadly as anti-authoritarians and anti-capitalists) is grounded in three factors: 1. Internal divisions that are far greater than those of the ruling class; 2. The inability to offer anything tangible to wide segments of the population that would even remotely come to the same order of magnitude what the ruling classes deliver (not just material goods, but also a sense of stability and order); 3. The lack of cultural authority or "traction" i.e. a distinct and clearly recognizable weltanachauung that just "makes sense" without the need of complicated explanations, corroborations and caveats.
When the left can offer something tangible and attains such a clearly recognizable common sense weltanschauung - it winds handily cf. the civil rights movement, or the Russian revolution. But when it does not, it simply loses its attractiveness, and the ruling classes doe not have to do much to attract popular support, let alone use oppression and coercion to maintain their power.
The apparent strength of the right lies in the incredible weakness of the left. The hackneyed adage TINA is true when taken in its descriptive rather than normative sense. There is no alternative - not because it is no longer possible to formulate one, but because noone has thus far proposed one that can be taken seriously.
Wojtek