Avedon Carol: Bloody blinkered

"I haven't read Off Center yet," says Atrios, "but these posts by Yglesias and Chait pretty much cover the weird world of Matt Bai."

All this is about Bai's review of a book he has chosen not to understand, because it talks about an environment he doesn't understand, either. Chait:

There is a strong conventional wisdom running through political punditry which holds that the system does what the people want. If one political party is winning, then it must be because they reflect majority opinion, and/or the other party is just screwing up.

Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written a book called Off-Center that powerfully challenges this conventional wisdom. Hacker and Pierson show that public opinion has not moved rightward over the last two decades, and that the Republican Party has had to go to extraordinary lengths to hide its unpopular domestic agenda from the public.

We've discussed on many occasions the fact that around 60%-80% of the American public supports the liberal position on most major issues. We've also observed that Republicans pretty much lie about their own programs and pretend to be liberal on issues that matter, derailing substantive discussion of their differences with liberalism by talking about trivia.