The Excluded Middle
Over the last few years, in this time of Democratic despondency, there has emerged a new genre of comfort books for liberals - books that seek to expose the nefarious means by which conservatives have amassed power, while at the same time reassuring urban liberals that they bear none of the blame. Thomas Frank's best-selling "What's the Matter With Kansas?," for instance, advanced the premise that rural voters just aren't sophisticated enough to vote in their own interests. In "Don't Think of an Elephant!," the linguist George Lakoff took a slightly different angle, suggesting that these voters weren't dumb, exactly, but that their brain synapses had been rewired by the Republicans' skillful manipulation of language. Now come Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, political science professors at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, with "Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy." Hacker and Pierson offer a variation on this same theme: voters can't make the right choices, they contend, because our system of government itself has dangerously malfunctioned.
The authors begin with the basic premise, buttressed with a sheaf of studies and laid out in clinical prose, that the American electorate is no more conservative than it ever was. "When Reagan was elected in 1980, the public mood was more conservative than in any year since 1952," Hacker and Pierson write. "But by the time of George W. Bush's election in 2000, Americans had grown substantially more liberal" and their views "were virtually identical to their aggregate opinions in 1972." This represents an immediate break with Frank, who argued that American voters have swerved hard right in response to social issues, but to anyone who's actually talked to voters around the country it is also a more plausible claim. For all the hype about the so-called religious right, most rural and exurban voters display little ideological zealotry; rather, they seem inclined toward mild conservatism on economics and foreign policy, along with a reverence for individual liberty - a combination which places them firmly in the historical mainstream of American politics.
By design, Hacker and Pierson argue, American democracy should force politicians to cater to this political center, and yet the Republican majority in Washington has all but ignored it. As a case study, the authors examine the G.O.P.'s tax cuts, which have reduced federal taxes to their lowest level since 1950. Even administration officials admitted, privately, that Americans weren't clamoring for a tax cut. And, as has often been reported, roughly 40 percent of these tax cuts went to the 1 percent of Americans who make the most money, while the average voter will get little more than years of budget deficits. How is it, Hacker and Pierson ask, that Republicans have managed to pursue such an extreme policy without incurring any political consequences?
Their answer is that Republicans have learned how to game the system shamelessly. Groups like Americans for Tax Reform and the Club for Growth enforced party discipline, forcing moderate Republicans to back the president or risk being unseated. The administration dishonestly marketed the tax cuts, promoting the idea that they would somehow transform the lives of middle-income families. And by inserting so-called sunset provisions into the final law, which made the tax cuts appear to expire when the intention was to renew them, they were able to disguise their true cost in the budgeting process. In all of these ways, the authors contend, Republicans managed to enact a policy that benefits the few while appearing to champion the many.
Hacker and Pierson go on to expand this argument into a broader indictment of Republican leaders, who, they claim, have sabotaged the checks and balances built into American government so that they can fool voters while governing in the narrow interests of extremists. In particular, they accuse Republicans of manipulating the media (as evidenced, for example by the embarrassing revelation that the administration paid commentators for favorable coverage) and of ruthlessly redrawing congressional districts.
No doubt Hacker and Pierson wish their book could have arrived a year ago, rather than at this moment of upheaval in Washington, when their underlying argument - that Republicans have figured out a way to do whatever they want without fear of centrist rejection - is being effectively disproved. After all, President Bush's poll numbers have reached historic lows, and moderates in Congress, sensing that the president can no longer protect them, have refused to extend tax cuts and slash critical spending. Bush's Social Security plan, which gets extended treatment in "Off Center," is effectively dead. The political center is apparently not the doormat the authors believe it to be. Nonetheless, the deeper message of Hacker and Pierson's book will no doubt resonate with a lot of readers - the idea that Republicans win elections by manipulating the electoral system and misrepresenting their policies, so that voters are unable to understand what they're voting for.
There is substantial truth to most of Hacker and Pierson's claims about Republican tactics. But is this duplicity really the sole reason, or even the main one, that so many moderate voters continue to help elect conservatives? Could it be, for instance, that the threat of terrorism and the G.O.P.'s historic advantage on issues of national security are contributing factors? (It's worth noting that Bush's presidency was in deep distress before the attacks of Sept. 11.) Hacker and Pierson flatly dismiss this idea; their book is concerned only with domestic policy, they say, because that's what voters care about most. What about the perception of Democratic elitism, which alienates a lot of rural voters who might otherwise vote for an alternative candidate? The authors reject this as a media exaggeration, and assert that poor and working-class Americans have never identified as strongly with the Democratic Party as they do today. This may be true of voters in the aggregate, but it conveniently fails to acknowledge what exit polls have made starkly clear - that middle-income white men have fled the party by the planeload in recent elections, providing the Republican margin of victory.
In fact, Hacker and Pierson can't seem to find any significant fault among Democrats at all, save for their chronic but so darn lovable disunity. Like Frank and Lakoff, the authors seem to prefer the more self-ennobling explanation that conservatives have seized power from an unwitting electorate. For all its pretensions to objectivity, "Off Center" deteriorates into just the latest example in our political discourse of what might be called confirmational analysis - that is, a work whose primary purpose is to confirm what its audience already believes.
In the end, for all its talk about the political center, there is a radical current that runs through "Off Center" - an insinuation that American democracy no longer works simply because Democrats haven't been winning. This is most pronounced in discussions of the Electoral College, which Hacker and Pierson dream of abolishing, and the structure of the Senate, which they deplore. Citing the New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg, the authors point out that if each senator represents half his state, then the Democratic minority in the Senate actually represents 30 million more voters than the Republican majority. This is very interesting, but, as a couple of political scientists should know, it's also irrelevant; our democracy is not, in fact, an Athenian democracy but a republic of states that was designed to protect small states from the dictates of urban elites. That some liberals, Hacker and Pierson among them, would reinvent the system now for their own ends is highly ironic, given that this is precisely the kind of contempt for the traditions of American democracy of which they accuse their opponents. Which just goes to show you that the real threat to our system of government is ideological certainty - no matter whose ideology happens to be at issue.
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