The recent State of Disunion Address by the president to a stony-faced Republican majority in Congress was comedy of a high order.

Here was the GOP triumphant, having achieved the majority they’d hoped and strived and connived for during six long years spent sabotaging Obama’s reign. Finally they had taken back the country. They keep taking it back — with Reagan, with Bush and now with the Boehner-McConnell binarchy, but the country keeps refusing to go backward.

The Republicans have gerrymandered districts, attempted in courts and state legislatures to roll back voting rights for the young, the poor, minorities and other members of the 47 percent. With help from the Supreme Court they’ve been able to raise unlimited funds from the laissez faire, Wall Street, restricted-Country Club wing of the party.

And yet here was Obama refusing to play by the script, to duck his head, lower his yes like Stepin Fetchit and realize new overseers were in charge of the plantation. On the contrary, he was threatening vetoes right and left, recognizing the existence of Cuba, proceeding with immigration reforms without Congress and generally behaving as if he was still president.

For their part, Republicans have only managed symbolic gestures since their victory. They have approved a pipeline that faces a veto, have voted on measures aimed at depriving some people of health care and denying abortions to women. More vetoes to come.

Republicans expected Obama to concede defeat and cave to their demands, to cooperate — which in their lexicon means the same as in Vladimir Putin’s — do things my way or else. Instead, a cheerful, energized, uppity Obama indicated he’d make deals if they want to negotiate and use vetoes and executive action if not. In short, same as before they won electoral victory.

Worse, he has seized the high ground and sought to set the agenda, demanding the country embrace Middle Class Economics, implying the Republicans favor Fat Cat Economics. Not an implausible notion after Mitt Romney and the 47 percent remark, the bail out of Wall Street rather than the man in the street in 2008, the GOP refusal to pass a jobs program, fund needed infrastructure and their obsessive demand for lower taxes on the wealthy. It doesn’t require rhetorical jujitsu to put the Republicans at a disadvantage on this issue.

Worse still for the Republicans, it appears Obama is playing a long game in making this his top issue for the next two years. Already the 2016 presidential hopefuls are beginning to start their engines. And they appear to have gotten the populist message implicit in the ire of the voters last November. They are mad as hell about their economic prospects and aren’t going to take it anymore.

The presidential wannabes have already begun to fall all over themselves pretending to care (for a change) about the working class. The State of the Union Address was aimed straight at this boiling discontent. In effect, it called the Republicans’ bluff. The President decided to stand up for Democratic orthodoxy. He probably won’t accomplish much that he thinks good, but he may prevent Republicans from accomplishing much that he regards as bad. Same game as the last six years, but with the roles reversed.

But he will also obviously advocate forcefully an agenda antithetical to theirs and may succeed in wrong-footing the Republicans since polls suggest some of the proposed measures are more popular than anything they have to offer. It’s a version of the plantation problem.

In 1860, the white ruling class in the South had the power, but the slave population amounted to 50 percent or more in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina. The gentry were fat and happy, but sitting on a time bomb. So is the GOP given economic and demographic realities that give more than 47 percent of the electorate a stake in reform.

In the SOTU and the forthcoming budget, Obama will call for free community college (or at least help in affording it), reduced student loan debt, equal pay for women, overtime pay and an increased minimum wage, child care for working mothers, measures to fight global warming, immigration reform, spending on infrastructure and R&D and higher taxes on the top one percent.

The GOP will be asked to explain why they are for the opposite. More tax breaks for the well-off and the lash of a subsistence wage for the many, more crumbling roads and bridges, unaffordable education for the average family and so forth. No wonder the grandees of the Grand Old Party looked so dyspeptic at the State of the Union.

They were supposed to be in a position to repeal Obama’s every measure, crush his hopes of a legacy and turn back the clock to happier days. So far, they are as unpopular as ever, passing bitter pills the people don’t want to swallow, and may now be forced to explain why they won’t deliver the Shining City on the Hill whose blueprint Obama just gleefully unveiled.

Life is so unfair for the one percent and those who do their bidding. But weep not. Money talks and the GOP is likely to get its way, but Obama is sure going to make the game uncomfortable for them along the way. What’s he got to lose?