Off Center

Great interview on NPR's "Fresh Air" today featuring political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy. Hacker and Pierson show how despite the fact that the majority of Americans remain political centrists, the Republican party's agenda has moved radically rightward in recent years. The puzzle of all this is that conventional wisdom in American politics has always held that the parties will always pull to the center in order to preserve their standing with American voters. Off Center shows how the Republicans have defied this rule. They've done it through amassing enormous campaign coffers, through gerrymandering congressional districts (the authors point out that there is now less turnover in Congress than in the Soviet politiburo during the communist era), through using legislative rules to shut Democrats out of the debate, and often through outright manipulation and miscommunication.

Unfortunately, it wasn't clear from the interview what Democrats ought to DO about any of this. One thing that was clear is that Democrats haven't been nearly as unified as a party compared with the Republicans. And as we've argued from the pages of this blog many times, the Democrats' only hope for the future is to articulate a clear alternative to the exremist conservatives views of the "reigning" party.