OFF CENTER

Reviewed 11/13/2006

Off Center, by Hacker & Pierson

Access to this book courtesy of the

OFF CENTER: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN-13: 978-0-300-10870-5
ISBN-10: 0-300-10870-2	261pp.	HC/GSI	$25.00

The argument of this book is that America's political market no longer looks like the effectively functioning markets that economics textbooks laud. Rather, it increasingly resembles the sort of market that gave us the Enron scandal, in which corporate bigwigs with privileged information got rich at the expense of ordinary shareholders, workers, and consumers.

– Page 16

The authors — professors of political science at Yale and UC Berkeley, respectively — draw on the University of Michigan's National Election Studies Cumulative Data File, on voting records for the U.S. Congress compiled by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, and on research published by other scholars.

This all points up some startling and significant conclusions:

Since 1975, Republicans — the party structure as well as elected officials — have turned sharply to the right, growing twice as conservative according to the National Election Studies data.1
This does not reflect a corresponding shift by American voters, whose orientation has remained essentially unchanged over that period.
Democrats have not, as might be expected, swung to the left in a mirror-image of the GOP's move. Their distance from the political center peaked at near 20% in 1986, and has since been turning back toward the center.
As has often been noted (except by Republican leadership), the tax cuts they have been pushing so strongly do disproportionately favor the wealthy.

The authors provide an assessment of our current political process that is thorough without being tedious. Even better, their diagnosis of the afflictions that beset it is followed by a set of generally sound prescriptions for curing those ills. The prescriptions include:

Reducing the legal and regulatory barriers to union organizing.
Measures at the federal level to enact non-partisan redistricting.
Eliminating the incentives that reward special interests pouring big money into campaigns.
Providing free air time to qualified candidates.
Enacting same-day voter registration.
Opening primary elections to all voters.
Making Election Day a national holiday.

Reading the book will give you a keen insight into what the GOP hard-liners have done to hijack the political process, and how they've managed it under our noses. It also goes some way toward being a good refresher on civics. It's well indexed and extensively end-noted. I recommend it.

1 According to these data (graphed on page 27), the 20% level, which the Democrats did not quite reach at their peak departure from center, is where the Republican rightward move began.

The Most Unkindest Cut

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