"But haven't the Congresses with a few noteworthy exceptions in the 1930's and 1960's been very conservative?"

This is an important point (although you leave out the 70's.)

In particular, the dramatic structural under-representation of urban voters in the Senate has made that body reliably OFF CENTER to the right for much of the past century.

The real burden of your argument is to show that the sorts of supposedly structural changes you talk about really can survive the first time the Republicans are deposed from power. Since there's a good, if not certain, probability that that might happen as early as 2006, the phenomenon you've described might be very shortlived.

Take the K-Street project -- one of the prominent features of the Republican approach to skew things off center. Apart from the fact that it has led to scandal of yet unknowable proportions, it is almost fully predicated on the notion that the Republicans will never again be in a minority. Once they have been deposed, it will be a very difficult sell for special interests ever again to get in line with any future Republican Congress demanding complete obeisance, because they will fear that Democrats will turn against them when they once again return to power.

Now the single most important factor in maintaining the off-center approach of the Republicans is the high incumbency rate of Congress, which is in turn driven by a number of other things, including campaign financing, etc. But here again, the high incumbency rate is not something inherent to the current system, I believe, though there are factors that may incline it that way. What certainly underpins the high incumbency rate is the attitude in the public that incumbency is actually a good thing. Yet THAT attitude is highly dependent on the larger political context. If, as is almost surely true these days, the public sees that Congress is leading the country in the wrong direction, and it grows to be disgusted with the current crop of legislators, voting for the incumbent is going to seem like a very bad idea to many. In that context, the incumbency rate can plunge dramatically.

Moreover, in many ways, the "off-center" approach of the Republicans can be tried only once, it seems to me. If the Republicans are routed from power, which may very well occur in the next election, then a lesson gets learned, I believe. Losing one's job has a way of focusing the mind. I doubt that if the Republicans are ignominously dumped from power, and in no small part because of the arrogance and inflexibility they displayed this time around, then future Republicans will ever again embrace these extreme techniques with the same gusto and discipline. It's worthwhile noting that even at this early stage, simply because of the perceived unpopularity of the Republican approach and agenda, already the discipline in the GOP is beginning to break down, with Congresspeople from moderate districts backing off any extreme measures they may have been asked to back.

In short, what you perceive as a permanent structural change I see instead as in effect a temporary experiment destined to end. And I personally believe it will see its finish in 2006.

Can you give us a quick run down of the reforms you all propose in your book?

I haven't had the pleasure of reading the book yet, but it seems to me this question of why the Republicans have won the last few rounds in the national political arena is very easy to overthink. You can tie yourself in knots agonizing over why, when the party has gone so far to the Right, it still manages to beat a Democratic Party that almost exactly reproduces the ideological bent of the electorate. But the answer is really very simple: People don't vote on issues (or ideology). For some reason I don't understand, and I've been at this game for many years now, even our most sophisticated political thinkers find this a very hard mental pill to swallow.

Let me tell you, the Republicans (I used to be one) don't find it hard at all. It comes very naturally to a party that is filled with people who don't believe government really does anything useful, at least in peacetime. If you don't care what government does, why should you care what a politician says about issues?

No, the reason why the Republicans have become so successful these past few cycles is simply because they're better at the GAME of politics than Democrats. They understand how and why people vote, and they exploit that knowledge. While we, the Democrats, continue to try and pound a square peg into a round hole. 

I notice something completely missing in your analysis. That is the recusal of progressives in the GOP, the refusal to maintain moderate to liberal republicans in the Lindsay-Javits mold, and their attraction to the Democratic party as the single party for progressive politics. It seems to me that any story of the GOP drift to the right can't simply focus on the Republicans as monolithci rightwingers from Alabama. The Eisenhower strain that cropped up in much of Nixon's domestic policy was never built upon by liberal activists that decided, in the seventies, to put all their eggs in the basket of the Dems. 

This, of course, might seem rational to political scientists, who long for European style parties that are ideologically defined, but it has certainly been a disaster for liberalism in this country. Reagan had surprisingly little trouble with his party, for instance, although in the seventies he was definitely an outlier. Compare that situation with Clinton's: Clinton had to deal with right wing dems who had no problem departing from Clinton's programs. The right has, correctly, seeded both parties. The left has adhered to only one. This is bad mathematics, and bad politics.  

Perhaps you will address this in later posts but what about the relatively small number of people who vote, especially in primaries, and the growing expense of running for any office.  This would seem to favor both extremes of the Right and the Left and freeze out the center.  The side that can best marshal its rescources financial and intellectual have a better chance of winning with an electorate that barely turns out 50%.

A related problem is with identifying the terms.  While most Democratic Party officeholders and most Americans are probably in agreement on many policies. However, many party activitists are a mirror of their Republican counterparts.  They are to the left of the officeholders and most Americans.  The merging of liberalism and the New Left has left the Democrats being attacked and defending views that they themselves don't hold and for which ironically their nominal supporters don't like them for not holding.

My current view of this is that the Republicans have essentially positioned themselves as the party of backlash.  I see this dating specifically to the 1966 mid-term elections, when the Republicans recovered somewhat from the 1964 debacle by carefully appealing to white backlash to the civil rights movement.

Since then, the Republicans have discovered that they can apply the same template to virtually every movement, skillfully playing the backlash angle to the 1960s counter-culture, women's rights, environmentalism, gay rights, any peace movement, and anything they can label as a "culture war.".

In all cases, there is an underlying narrative that "our traditional way of life" is being undercut.  This is currently playing out in the absurdly transparent "war on Christmas" fantasy.

Democrats always represent "them" in this narrative.  No one embodied this more than Ronald Reagan.

As long as this narrative is the backdrop to political debate, no amount of sensible nuts-and-bolts proposals on such matters as health insurance or middle-class jobs will crack the Republican base.

ColoDem is correct.
Are there electoral mechanisms through which the right has gained and consolidated political power? Of course. Is the increased power of incumbancy important? Sure. How about the right's gaming of the media's inclination to report truth-claims instead of truth? Most definitely. Voter suppression? Absolutely. All these things, and more, give an extremist political party cover, credibility, and freedom from accountability.
But what's the single most important factor? Not media management or electoral shenanigans. The single most important factor is the emergence of the Republican Party (and conservatism more generally) as an -ethnic- identity.
Ethnicity isn't fixed. Because an ethnicity is of recent emergence doesn't imply that it isn't entirely genuine (such as the emergence of 'Palestinian' as a specific ethnic identity). We are seeing the flowering of 'Republican' and 'conservative' as ethnic identities. The emphasis on the victimization of the in-group by a powerful and almost demonic out-group (see: Bill O'Reilly & Co.'s endless drive to assign blame), the self-identification with group leaders such that acknowledgement of shortcomings is psychologically agonizing, the emphasis on dogmatic faith instead of critical investigation, etc.
The notion that some sub-set of Republican votes are voting against their interests is nonsense: they're voting -for- their ethnic group. The notion that we should appeal to reason or even self-interest is nonsense: you can't argue or reward someone out of their ethnic identity (though you can slowly transform the expressions of that ethnicity, and of course over time many ethnic identities change utterly or disappear). 
This isn't a conflict of ideas or policy, and there is no 'magic bullet' which will make a Democrat attractive to Republicans. Republicans voted by massive margins against a Vietnam vet with combat experience, and for a champagne-unit candidate who misled troops to war without an exit plan ... and they honestly thing they're pro-military. That's not a belief amenable to reason: that's an article of ethnic faith. 
Republicans overwhelming support George Bush because he's Republican. There's no other reason. 

Why has the capacity of voters to "send a message" -- the cornerstone of democratic government -- eroded so much?

Voters still send a message.

In 2000, they sent a message that Al Gore should be President, but somehow the Supreme Court thought otherwise.

In 2004, they sent a message that John Kerry was a really crappy candidate.

The GOP has first of all a lock on white males. It is the party of white males. Everyone knows that.

Moreover, Americans have generally been feeling pretty macho lately. We won WW1. We won WW2. We won the Cold War. We won Iraq 1. We are the greatest. When you're feeling that macho, you don't vote for candidates who resemble history professors. You vote for candidates who resemble football coaches. If you always vote for the more macho candidate, election after election, pretty soon you're living in a banana republic.

Many didn't read a newspaper back then  .  .  .  and without TV, you didn't know what Tammany Hall or Mayor Daley was really up to.  artappraiser

I'm not sure you're right, here.  Seventy-five years ago newspaper circulation was substantial; every good size burg had a morning and evening paper at the least, and people read the paper attuned to their ideological bent.

TV over the past 25 years ("If it bleeds, it ledes" -- notice the cute insider spelling?) has generated a false consciousness in the electorate -- crime out of control, a plague of crack babies, a pedophile in every nursery school, etc.

It isn't so much a matter of being whelmed by cynicism -- and irony (see Nietzsche) is beyond most voters -- but a matter of being instructed by an unrealistic virtual world.

"In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion." Howard Beale

The corporate, right-wing media is the corporate, right-wing media.

Propaganda matters; the American political discourse is entirely in the hands of a corporate oligarchy, some of which is partisan right-wing and the rest of which is just generally right-wing.

You can talk all you want about the decline of professional journalism, but the foundation is media consolidation, a consolidation, which was brought about by the Republicans.  Big Media owes the Republicans their very existence and with legal issues of copyright and digital rights management hanging fire, Big Media will do its part.

In your reply, please discuss your assessment of the resiliance of the system that you describe.

The GOP is a coalition, and you argue that an unprecedented set of institutions and policies have allowed the leadership of the GOP to pursue right-wing policies without breaking up the coalition.

But is there a breaking point? Do you think that developments such as failure in Iraq, scandals, deficits, the diminshing quality of social policy, or the alienation of secular Republicans, could break up the GOP coalition (for example, by driving moderates to defect to the Dems, or by driving some elements of the GOP into passivity)?

Could the GOP hang itself if it gets enough rope, and open space for a Democratic counterattack? Or is a program of reform in the way political competition happens in the US the only way out of the political impasse?

Living in the blue state of Montana, I've often been confused about why people continue to vote Republican especially when it is against their self-interest to do so.  If you are poor, but are passionately against "the death tax" then you clearly do not understand that the estate tax doesn't apply to you in any matter this side of science fiction.  If you are strictly Christian, then why are you voting for someone who is trying to legalize torture and invades random countries to kill their people?

Two things are clear to me:  The system is broken and the Republican message machine has been and is extraordinarily effective.

Here in Montana we have a single congressman (Denny Rehberg) who is a rich conservative Republican.  Denny doesn't reflect my views any better than a Martian, but he is going to be my rep in congress until he quits or is found with the wrong person in his bed.  Our democracy badly needs to be updated.  People here correctly recognize that their views will never be expressed so they just stop being involved and voting.  You can wring your hands and wail about this, but I somewhat sympathize with this too rational inertia.  If I write to Denny, he is going to send me a insincere letter about how he respects my view and then do whatever he wants to do anyway.  If I work to defeat him, I will have wasted my time, money and effort in a hopeless cause.  Consider the actions of a brave and effective officer in Vietnam or Iraq.  Certainly this officer can accomplish many things, but because the setup of the system is so disfunctional, he cannot alter the final result no matter how brave or hardworking he is. We are facing a Kobayashi Maru scenario. This doesn't mean I will stop trying to replace Denny, but clearly our political system has to have fundamental reform and reorganization or we will continue haplessly losing.

I run a small donut shop and one day I was listening to Rush by chance and heard his talking points.  Not ten minutes later, a customer came in and repeated those talking points.  In a big rural state like Montana, radio is remarkably effective.  

I haven't read your book, but I will and I look foward to hearing you suggestions for changing the system. 

This is of course a big part of the Republican success. They have become the party of angry reaction.

There's not a real mystery about how this happened. The labor movement declined in power in America, corporate power increased. The kinds of manufacturing jobs that supported the asperations of generations of americans for a better life were phased out of the "new economy".

All this caused real resentment of minorities at the idea of social leveling and anyone who was seen as "getting ahead" by means of public money. Crime, welfare fraud, the decline of traditional social values, etc.

Thus the Nixon reaction against the "entitlement society." Republicans have played into this mind-set ever since. These ideas are NOT merely a delusion either. Democrats have betrayed the very people they call upon for support, while 8 years of Clinton have cemented the idea that "they're all the same", or as one economically devastated Kentucky woman and Bush supporter interviewed in the Washinton Post before the election put it: "if the Democrats were ever going to do something about health care, they'd have done it under Clinton." So, why NOT support Bush, who at least seems to reflect their social values?

The fewer good paying jobs there are, the harder people have to work in Wall-Mart America, the more the fear and resentment grows.  This is exactly the social phenomena that drove Mussolini and Hitler to power in the 30's and it's fueling the anti-immigration movement right now. The rise of extremism, fundamentalist religious crusades to re-establish traditionalism, the overarching desire for order at the cost of freedom, fueled by 9-11, fear of the unknown, the "other" who is out to get me and undermine my values, my life. This is the exact social pathology of fascism as any student of the 30's can tell you.

The worse things get, the stronger this reaction becomes, thus Republican incompetence on the economy drives their greater success.  

Probably the only thing that prevents the Republican party from latching onto this sentiment as a election winning strategy for the next 15 years is the fact that business is OPPOSED to the constant supply of hard-working cheap labor. This means that the Republicans have to talk loudly, but carry a twig about "immigration reform."

How far this cycle of hate and fear goes depends in large part on whether labor and it's allies can ever rebound and start seriously organizing again. 

All attempts to control politics from the top down or to fix things by regaining control at the national level are doomed to failure. The Republicans built their current success from the bottom up by creating a conservative social movement starting in the 1960s and culminating in the election of Reagan. Only a bottom up social movement can succeed in stemming the drift towards totalitarianism.  

That movement can be allied to Democrats who share our objectives for peace and greater prosperity, but cannot be controlled by the party or a mere arm of it. 

definitely benefits the party who has talked dismissively of government as being "the problem" for 25 years now, and also the party which generally prefers low voter turnout.

This is an excellent, excellent point and I think it goes a long way to answering the one of the big questions of this thread.

And I'd like to put forth the thought that the situation may not have changed as much as people might like to think.

First, it fits with Clinton's wins as he stressed the first time that "the era of big government is over," and by the second time he had done a good enough job for people to trust him, and it also fits with Carter's win, as he pledged to bring simple moral values back to D.C.

The "tax and spend liberal" label has been a killer, and not just because of the "I want lower taxes" part, but because their is a strong belief out there that Dems fucked things up with a big Fed government in the 60's. That big government, and indeed, often local government cannot do lo