If I were to recommend one book for anyone to read about our political stalemate it would be Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.
There is a sad irony in my recommendaton because Jacob Hacker, of Yale, is the person who more than anyone else gave life to the "public option" now so in contention in the Senate. Hacker's idea was in fact ingenious; use the "frame" of competition to create a public plan that would keep private insurance honest and begin to break up the monopolistic tendencies of health insurance in the United States.
And it was this strategy that was immediately assailed and stopped by moderate and conservatives in the Democratic Party, in part because they wished to defend the insurance monopolies in their own state, and partly (mostly?) because they feared that there would be a backlash against reform in their red states or districts which might result in their defeat.
I would have preferred to see reform built around an opening up of Medicare to the 55 and over population to relieve business and citizens of the really expensive medical needs of that age group, and I would have striven to open up the VA more to all veterans and to expand Medicaid in ways that relieve the burden on the states.
The goal would have been to build on what we have in the public sector, make it stronger, and gamble that a larger public presence could be a more secure platform to launch the next big wave of reform.
Nevertheless, the public option and the reform plan of the Senate is good enough for government work and it may well still pass in some state.
But my point in recommending Off Center is because it makes a convincing case that reform in the U.S. political system is very, very hard, for a lot of structural features of our democracy. The Senate and the Electoral College are just openers but they can play a crucial role in giving very radical ideas a large hearing in the U.S.
Given the crisis in the American media, today we are in the strange position of debating policies that are almost absurd on the face of it (more tax cuts, more military spending, more "speech" for corporations and the wealthy, attacks on global warming and science generally, and so forth, as Kevin Drum points out) as legitimate alternatives to ideas that seem attractive not just to Democrats but to the "middle" of the public opinion. But the middle doesn't hold, for reasons that Off Center so sadly outlines.
The truth is that many of the same features that deform the American democracy were present at the creation, given slavery and a federal system that represents states much like corporations, as entitled even though half of the population lives in 10 of those states.
The other source I would recommend is an article by Michael Lind, "The Southern Coup," that ran in the New Republic in 1995 and it best captures the central role that the South (once again) plays in foiling the plans for a more progressive democracy.
How long, Oh Lord?
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