The Excluded Middle

Review by MATT BAI

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.