The Limits of “Sensible Centrism”

• Published date: 01 November 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12300
• Date: 01 November 2014

804 Public Administration Review • November | December 2014

Book Reviews

Alasdair Roberts is professor of law at

Suffolk University Law School in Boston. His

most recent book is

The End of Protest: How

Free-Market Capitalism Learned to Control

Dissent

(Cornell University Press, 2013).

E-mail: alasdair.roberts@gmail.com

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 6, pp. 804–806. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12300.

formed to challenge “hegemonic Democratic control

… of national policy making,” the core message of

the movement was that national political institutions

could not be trusted (58).  e stridency of national

political discourse was intensif‌i ed as print and

broadcast media were supplanted by talk radio, cable

television, and Internet-based social media. Mann and

Ornstein say that we are witnessing the “return of a

nineteenth century partisan press” (xv). Added to this

is the breakdown of controls over the f‌l ow of money

into politics, through lobbying as well as campaign

spending.

But the authors also suggest that troubles in

Washington have deeper roots. In the South, con-

servatives f‌l ed from the Democratic to the Republican

Party, increasing the ideological gap between the two

groups. And the conservative Sun Belt states gained

inf‌l uence as jobs and people migrated from Northern

states. Mann and Ornstein suggest that conservative

Southerners drew dif‌f erent lessons from the cultural

and political tumult of the 1960s than did Northern

Democrats.  ey are now less tolerant of secularism,

threats to public order, and federal activism. Party

platforms ref‌l ect this fundamental division in atti-

tudes about the role of government in general and the

federal government in particular (47).

 is part of the analysis is critically important but hast-

ily done. Mann and Ornstein subscribe to the view that

there are two Americas—one red, one blue, and divided

by geography. But it is not as simple as North and

South. Other studies have suggested that the real divi-

sion is between urban and rural America. Democrats

gain heavy support from the coastal megalopolises and

urban centers in supposedly red states. Republicans,

meanwhile, have a disproportionate share of votes in

less populated areas, not only in the South but also in

the Midwest and Northeast. “Rural and urban voters

live in very dif‌f erent cultures,” the political scientist

Seth McKee has observed, and these rural–urban dif‌f er-

ences have “contributed to massive voter polarization”

in recent elections (2008, 105–6). James Gimpel and

 omas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s

Even Worse than It Looks: How the American

Constitutional System Collided with the New

Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

248 pp. $26.00 (cloth), ISBN: 9780465031337;

$16.99 (paper), ISBN: 9780465074730.

In It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American

Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics

of Extremism,  omas E. Mann and Norman J.

Ornstein provide a sobering description of how politics

in Washington has coarsened over the span of a genera-

tion. Today, the authors warn, “America’s capacity to

govern” is under threat (xvii).  ey have some practical

suggestions on how to make Washington work better.

But the remedies may be unequal to the underlying

problem: a profound shift in the structure of American

politics and attitudes about the role of the federal

government in American life.

For Mann and Ornstein, the clearest sign of dysfunc-

tionality in Washington is the inability to solve prob-

lems—evidenced by deadlock over the federal budget

and the debt ceiling during 2011, which resulted in

a downgrading of the United States’ credit rating by

Standard & Poor’s. But there are other symptoms, too,

such as the decline of goodwill among legislators and

the collapse of “regular order” in the legislative branch

as parties bend rules to seek short-term political

advantages. Mann and Ornstein think that the United

States is acquiring “parliamentary parties”—cohesive,

highly adversarial groupings—that are ill suited to a

system in which the minority party has ample oppor-

tunity to jam up the works.  ey place particular

blame on the Republican Party, which they describe

as an “insurgent outlier”—ideologically extreme and

determined to “reverse decades of economic and social

policy by any means necessary” (132).

Mann and Ornstein lay out some of the proximate

causes of this sorry state of af‌f airs.  ey describe the

emergence of a new conservative movement in the late

1970s and its growth over the next 30 years. Initially

 e Limits of “Sensible Centrism”

Sonia M. Ospina and Rogan Kersh, Editors

Alasdair Roberts

Suffolk University Law School