Defying Gravity

In Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson—political science professors from Yale and Berkeley, respectively—direct our attention to one of the central mysteries of our time: how Republican elected officials have turned themselves into distinctly less amusing and way less lovable versions of Wile E. Coyote. How is it that the national Republican Party has been able to govern from the far right even while the public opposes it on issue after issue? Enacting policies that have no visible means of public support (indeed, that engender widespread public opposition), the Republicans, by every known law of political physics, should have long since dropped to earth. Though the party "has strayed dramatically from the moderate middle of public opinion," write Hacker and Pierson, "the normal mechanisms of democratic accountability have not been able to bring them back."