You can come up with all the elaborate diagrams and schema you like for thinking and talking about power. They’ll definitely be read by reviewers one and two (it is always reviewer two, innit?). And once it’s published in some paywalled journal it will be read by, ooh, a dozen or so other people. World-changing.
There are also metaphors, memes, whatever you want to call them about power. Some of my favourites-
- “when the axeman came into the forest, the trees said to each other ‘don’t worry, the handle is one of us’.”
- “there’s no justice, there’s just us.”
- “the upper crust is just a bunch of crumbs sticking together.”
- “the definition of alternatives is the supreme instrument of power.” (That last one is not so catchy or vivid, true, but oh my it’s good – E.E. Schattschneider, since you ask).
Anyhoos, since metaphor work doesn’t actually matter (nothing matters very much and very much matters not at all, as someone once is said to have said), here goes, well, nothing.
Ready? Drumroll please…
We can think of “the state” (both the government and the permanent (1) decision-shaping/blocking bureaucracy (2)) as the relatively inert bit of cloth tied to a rope in a tug of war contest.
There’s groups – outnumbered, outspent, often outthought – trying to pull the state in the direction of sanity, “progressive values”, ecological thinking. They pull haphazardly. There’s only lots of hands on the rope during upswings in “public” concern (related to what is being talked about in the media – issue attention cycles, movement cycles, policy windows blah blah blah).
Meanwhile, though, the other side has paid professionals, lobbyists, an entire ecosystem of books, think tanks, mass media, money to buy tame academics etc; they can shape the ‘norms’. They can get the watching crowd to berate the progressive pullers as trouble-makers, communists, anarchists, eco-freaks etc. And so it goes on.
The key thing is that all this is framed as a “fair fight”, as if there are roughly equal pressures towards sanity and towards greed acting on the ‘state’. And anyway, as per footnote 2, it is not as if the state is a disinterested actor in all this.
To close (because I am bored with the sound of my fingers clattering on the keyboard, and don’t have much else useful to add – YES IT IS A REALLY IMPERFECT METAPHOR. The “baddies” throw tacks on the ground to make it harder for the ‘good guys’ (3). They send fake rope pullers in to confuse matters and have the progressives over-estimate their own strength. They grease the rope. It’s not a level-ground rope pull blah blah blah.
Maybe the metaphor IS perfect, because it lets you talk about all these extra tactics, strategies and logistics that the assholes have at their disposal. Mostly talking to yourself, natch, as the ecological realities that allowed ‘civilisation’ to flourish are flame-throwered in real time. But as the noted philosopher with the initials HS said “eh, whaddya gonna do?“
Footnotes
(1) Theseus’ ship and all that malarkey
(2) Decision-shaping and blocking? Like this, for example.
(3) The self-declared ‘good guys’ have their own blind spots. Oh my they do.
marchudson.net 
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