Why are conservatives so effective in American Politics?

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written Why is American Politics Off Center?, and have been invited by Kevin Drum has invited them to discuss their book on his blog Political Animal. This following statement encapsulates what I have been writing about frequently.

It is crucial to remember, after all, that Republican electoral advantages have been very narrow. In many respects, Bush’s majority in 2001 was just the flip side of Clinton’s in 1992. Yet the GOP clearly had much more success in shifting the contours of American politics and policy.

In the face of a puzzle like this, the temptation is to search for a one-size-fits-all explanation. In response to Kevin’s post on Friday, a fair number of participants thought they had the single easy answer (“it’s framing!” or “it’s the use of cultural issues as a wedge!” or “it’s because Democrats are bumblers/cowards/sell-outs” or “it’s race”). There were probably a couple of dozen factors raised by one person or another, which strongly suggests that there's more than one thing at work. To us at least, it also suggests that what's crucial is how these different plausible GOP advantages actually come together in reinforcing the party's power.

Our own emphasis lies on the organizational and social foundations of political power, rather than on the character of personalities or particular rhetorical moves. In particular, we think a central source of GOP success lies in the unprecedented (within the contours of modern American politics) capacity of conservative elites to coordinate their activities and operate in a unified fashion.

In a political system that was specifically designed to prevent unified action, coordination is an enormous political advantage, helping the GOP to get the maximum value out of many of the advantages mentioned in Friday’s discussion. It makes it far easier to control the agenda (which is crucial in politics), to stay on message, to use legislative procedure (as well as even more obscure elements of policymaking) to pursue off-center goals while presenting a more moderate face to the public, to divide opponents, and to protect potentially vulnerable Republicans from exposure—as well as shower them with cash if all else fails. The capacity to work in an unusually unified way allows GOP elites to provide what we call backlash insurance—a variety of protections to politicians who might otherwise feel a need to be more responsive to public opinion.

In short, the conservatives do not have any overwhelming support in the electorate, but they have had an unusual degree of success in getting their agenda approved through our (intentionally) rather fragmented political process. While there are a number of individual factors that they use to get advantage, the single long-term advantage is their ability to act in a unified manner within a political system specifically designed to fragment political power and prevent exactly that kind of unified action.

It seems to me that this advantage hits exactly at the most significant weakness of Democratics and Progressives. They cannot act in a unified manner.

The counter to the conservative advantage, then, has to be to either unify the anti-conservatives politically or to change the structure of American politics so that the unification the conservatives have accomplished becomes impossible. I would expect the successful effort will have elements of a little unification and a lot of political restructuring.