Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson's Off Center

...How has the Republican leadership imposed its priorities—tax cuts for the rich, Medicare programs that benefit drug companies, weakening environmental regulations and the like— without paying a political price...

...Enacting policies that have no visible means of public support (indeed, that engender widespread public opposition), the Republicans, by every known law of political physics, should have long since dropped to earth...

...In Off Center, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson—political science professors from Yale and Berkeley, respectively—direct our attention to one of the central mysteries of our time: how Republican elected officials have turned themselves into distinctly less amusing and way less lovable versions of those midair Warnerians...

...By going after Social Security and botching both Katrina and the war, the GOP shone the spotlight on its deepest values—the one thing it could not withstand...

...Yet, although Hacker and Pierson's analysis is both prescient and accurate, it is incomplete...

...Indeed, it's only since the Republicans' advantage on that issue has been eroded over the past year by the unconcealable debacle of the Iraq War that the stranglehold of the Republican right over its own party and the national agenda has begun to weaken...

...The kinds of mass organizations that could sound the alarm, unions above all, have shrunken precipitously...

...The authors take some comfort in what they hope will become a new burst of union activism and the growth of the Internet as a medium for liberal mobilization and mass fund-raising...

...Outside the Bible Belt, the Christian right might well he unable to elect candidates to its liking, even in primaries, absent the financial help of the DeLay-Norquist machine...

...Even so, I'd give the Democrats even odds that they can retake at least the House...

...So whence the Republican revolution...

...AND THERE'S MORE to the successes of the right than its ability to control the debates in Congress over taxes and spending...

...The right was ascendant before September 11, 2001, of course, but the rightward course of government and the ability of the right to strengthen itself in the elections of 2002 and 2004 were surely abetted in no small degree by the Republican advantage on national security...

...It was one thing to push through tax cuts that only the rich and the right really wanted and quite another to argue for dismantling, in Social Security, the one social program on which the vast majority of Americans actually count...

...In sum, they offer nonutopian recommendations to help derail the top-down Republican revolution and restore some accountability to American politics...

...House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has made it clear that those fifteen Democrats who broke rank to vote for CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement, a neo-NAFTA) won't get preference in future committee assignments, but the party should do more than that to them...

...Mobilization of the wealthy has increased to the point that it has changed not just quantitatively but qualitatively: in the 1950s, the combined parties contacted fewer than 15 percent of wealthy Americans...

...And if they do—for that matter, if they don't—Off Center outlines things they can still learn from the Republican playbook...

...They looked at the budget cuts that their more fanatical right-wing colleagues were calling for in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—the official Republican policy being to comfort the drenched poor and afflict the dry—and cringed at the thought of the public's reaction...

...Poll after poll over the past half-decade has shown that, confronted with a choice between more spending in areas such as education, the environment, and health coverage, and returning that money in tax cuts, Americans have opted for the enhanced programs over taxes by margins of at least 40 percent...

...Bicameral conference committees have been reduced to assemblages in which Tom DeLay had a meeting of the minds with Bill Frist or, just as frequently, himself...

...In short, a powerful ultraright machine dominates the Republican Party, ensuring in almost every instance that when veteran moderates retire, their successors will stand some light years to their right...

...In short, they realized that their party had finally overreached, in trying to change those few policies to which most Americans really do pay some attention...

...But there's been more to the rise of the right in the GOP and the eclipse of the moderates than the fact that the leaders of the Beltway right have taken up arms against the moderates...

...If unions and the party leaders could back proponents of popular Democratic positions and punish those who don't with anywhere near the regularity that the Republican machine rewards those members who vote for unpopular policies, the Democrats would be in far better shape...

...In the wake of these Republican debacles, the Democrats have opened a double-digit lead over Republicans when voters are asked which party they'd like to represent them in Congress...

...THE REPUBLICAN revolution they depict is almost entirely top-down...

...Unions may back primary challengers to those among the fifteen who come from safely Democratic districts...

...How is it that the national Republican Party has been able to govern from the far right even while the public opposes it on issue after issue...

...The tale the authors tell and the explanations they adduce won't strike the lay student of politics as altogether new...

...But Off Center is valuable precisely because it gathers these accounts and analysis in one place—and because the authors understand just how new, how radical, and how deeply undemocratic the Republican political order truly is...

...Off Center is chiefly an account and analysis of the many and varied techniques by which the current DISSENT / Winter 2006 97 generation of hard-right Republican leaders has been able to push American politics and policy rightward without paying a price at the polls...

...Responding to a range of questions measuring their support for more services even at the cost of higher taxes, fully 39 percent of Americans in the year 2000 opted for more federal spending, while just 17 percent wanted less...

...For its part, the public has not joined the Republicans in their rightward galumph...

...Underpinning these changes is the all but exponentially increasing role of money in politics, and the decreasing role of organizations able to champion and mobilize the interests of those outside the economic elites...

...The revolution they describe may be topdown in many aspects, but there is nonetheless a freestanding, right-wing base—as they 98 DISSENT / Winter 2006 themselves acknowledge in citing a Campaigns and Elections survey that concluded that thirtyone state Republican Parties were completely or somewhat dominated by the Christian right in 1994, and that that number had risen to forty-four state parties by 2003...

...Looking at three decades of survey data, Pierson and Hacker conclude that on both economic and social issues, the public has, if anything, moved somewhat to the left...

...They argue for a nonpartisan process of reapportionment and for the restoration of the Fairness Doctrine...

...Such organizational expressions of the Republican rich as the Club for Growth—founded in 1999, but already the biggest single funder in Republican campaigns other than the party itself—weigh in on behalf of right-wing Republicans only, most avidly, in primary challenges to GOP moderates...

...The Democrat with the record at the midpoint of his delegation, by contrast, was just 28 percent more liberal than his early-seventies counterpart, and that change was largely due to the elimination of the southern wing of the party...

...Weekly and an oped columnist for the Washington Post...

...The level of spending in the 2002 midterm elections, the authors note, was a whopping 50 percent higher than the spending in the 1998 midterms...

...For his part, Norquist lines up the National Rifle Association, the anti-choice groups, and the religious right on behalf of the same right-wing candidates...

...Meanwhile, the countervailing forces and centrist pressures normally present in a functioning democracy have atrophied...

...The last time we saw a lead like that was in the run-up to the Republican landslide of 1994...

...Indeed, some of their themes first surfaced in Tom Edsall's 1984 study, The New Politics of Inequality, and the attentive newspaper reader may recognize that some of their stories have been ripped, not from the headlines, but from that sixteenth paragraph, the explanatory one, in the Post or Times (New York or L.A...

...account of how a particularly outrageous bill became law...

...Computer-facilitated district-drawing and partisan control of reapportionment have all but eliminated swing districts, so that moderate Republicans live in fear not of losing general elections, but of being defeated in primaries by right-wing zealots...

...Today, the Democrats contact 25 percent of them and the Republicans, one-third...

...From Wile E. Coyote to Daffy Duck, countless cartoon characters have charged ahead even though there's naught beneath them but a thousand-foot drop...

...The days of weak parties and congressional representatives acting as individual entrepreneurs in the absence of any real machines, they note, have come and gone, at least from the Republican side of the aisle...

...Looking in particular at Tom DeLay (before his fall), Karl Rove, and pressure-group coordinator Grover Norquist, they chart the rise of an ideological party leadership that has maximized its strength at the expense of every other element in the GOP universe...

...It's one thing to dominate the discourse on right-wing airwaves and another to have the whole nation watch as the citizens of a major American city drown through the indifference and ineptitude of federal officials...

...It's only when they pause, look down, and realize that there's nothing propping them up that they finally careen to earth...

...The ability of DeLay to deliver—and withhold—legislative perks has put pressure on the business lobbies to become agents of his agenda, even more than he is of theirs, lest they lose out in the general distribution of tax cuts and other goodies...

...For many of the reasons that Hacker and Pierson enumerate, of course gerrymandered districts, the importance of big money in politics, the ability of the Republican machine to mobilize voters through manipulated grievances (keep an eye on the immigration issue in 2006)—the Republicans may yet survive the current downturn...

...In fact, in the aftermath of the Big Bang that was the political realignment of the sixties (chiefly, the conversion of the white South from Democratic to Republican), the particles speeding away from the center are almost all on the right...

...Abruptly, they opposed the president's suspension of prevailing wages for workers rebuilding the Gulf Coast...

...The media fail to convey the radical nature of the policy shifts in George W. Bush's Washington...

...Since Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1995, committee chairs have lost their independence and become term-limited agents of the leadership...

...Though the party "has strayed dramatically from the moderate middle of public opinion," write Hacker and Pierson, "the normal mechanisms of democratic accountability have not been able to bring them back...

...DISSENT / Winter 2006 99 Meanwhile, after four years of Republican unity and Democratic defections, it's the Democrats who've achieved unity on budgets and taxes, while the Republicans have trouble bringing their measures to a vote...

...If the Democrats know how to abet it, gravity will now kick in...

...Above all, the justification for our increasingly mysterious occupation of Iraq—an occupation devoted to mitigating the consequences of our intervention—was well beyond not only the machinations of Rove and DeLay, but the oratorical powers of Bush and Cheney...

...One bit of conventional wisdom that Pierson and Hacker dispel immediately is that American politics is polarizing in a symmetrically bipartisan fashion, with the Republicans moving right, the Democrats moving left, and the American public staying in the middle...

...In 2003, the Republican member of the House with a voting record that placed him at the median of his party was 73 percent more conservative than the median Republican member of the early seventies...

...After a decade of running off of cliffs without the slightest negative consequence, the Republican moderates have suddenly paused and looked down...

...If anything, 2005 was the year during which the Republicans' ability to govern off-center reached its limits and began to falter...

...And so, the Republican moderates began to move—or, more precisely, became more fearful of being defeated in the 2006 general election than in the primaries...

...HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of both the American Prospect and the L.A...