Interview with Hacker and Pierson about the Republican agenda and the corruption of Congress

Terry Gross:  The accepted wisdom in American politics is that the moderate center prevents either party from moving too far to the extremes.  In the new book, Off Center, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson write that the Republican Party has managed to defy this accepted wisdom.  They say that the Party has strayed from the moderate middle of public opinion, sided with extremes, and yet faced little public backlash.  After making this case, Off Center analyzes the techniques the Republicans have used to move the political agenda further to the right.  Jacob Hacker is an associate professor of Political Science at Yale and a fellow at the New America Foundation.  He's written for the New Republic, the Nation, the New York Times and the LA Times.  Paul Pierson is a professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley and a former professor of Government at Harvard. You write that the Republicans have defied the normal laws of political gravity.  Which laws do you have in mind?

Jacob Hacker:  Well, there are two laws that we have in mind.  The conventional wisdom is that politicians almost always seek the center.  That's because they need to capture swing voters, the people right in the middle of the electorate, to gain office.  So politicians are expected generally to appeal to the moderate center of public opinion.  The second law that we talk about is that we have a very convoluted political system with lots of checks and balances.  It was designed to make action very difficult.  So if you are trying to change politics and policy, you shouldn't be able to radically change them, at least not without really strong public support for your actions.  But what Republicans have done, essentially, is govern quite far to the right of the center of public opinion and at the same time achieve and pursue many of their most conservative goals.  To us that's very puzzling.  It really is defying what we think of as the normal course of American politics.

TG:  You argue in your books that Republicans have been able to win elections in spite of being further to the right than the majority of Americans in the mainstream... What evidence do you have that the Republican Party is further to the right in its agenda than the majority of Americans or the majority of Republicans who voted for them?

Paul Pierson:  Well, in the book we run through a great deal of evidence that looks at Republican politicians and also the activist members of their party, sometimes referred to as "the base."  Which show that, on a whole set of issues having to do with both the voting behavior of politicians and the positions that are staked out by activists, that they've moved way to the right in the past 20 or 25 years.  The changes are really quite dramatic and can be demonstrated systematically.  So one might think, based in part on what Jacob was just saying about how politicians try to stay close to where the voters are, that that must mean voters have moved well to the right as well.  But in fact, if you look systematically at public polling evidence, and there are political scientists who measure every public opinion poll and look at the same questions that have been asked repeatedly over many many years, there are simply no signs that the opinions of the voters have shifted to the right at all on the major issues.

TG:  One of the questions that you pose in the book is,  if the Republican Party is further to the right than mainstream American , then how have they managed to win elections.  What answers do you give to that?...

The interview can be read in its entirety at The Scribe.