Ruy nicely notes that we're not selling A Theory of Everything. In fact, in our many discussions of Off Center we've developed a special aversion to comments that look at the big changes occurring in American politics and say, "it's easy to explain.  It's all because of X", where X is any one of twenty or so possible culprits.

When you're dealing with the shifting politics of a really big and complicated society, it is almost certainly a mistake to think there is any single golden key that offers the essential explanation. It makes more sense to track a series of shifts in the social and politial environment and think about whether and how they are interconnected (indeed, we think one of the great strengths of TPM has always been Josh's relentless efforts to push everyone to think about how event A or scandal B relates to the Bigger Picture.)

Our book does, however, plug for one central concept that helped us to pull together some of the multiple strands that have generated and sustained off-center politics: the idea of coordination. The GOP has created the most unified and coordinated political party in modern American history -- as we show in the book, that's a fact not just an assertion.

This coordination has played a central role in helping the Republicans to defy the normal laws of political gravity, even as they have moved far to the right. In a political system that was specifically designed to prevent unified action, coordination is an enormous political advantage. It has helped the GOP get the maximum value out of many of the other trends taking place in American society: the transformation of the media (including both the rise of avowedly partisan conservative media empires and the growing fixation on profits of mainstream news organizations), the increase in economic inequality, the rising role of money in politics, and the increase in safe seats.

Although Congress is at the center of the GOP machine, coordination has extended to embrace powerful interests (the K street project), the White House, the right-wing media, "grass-roots" advocacy groups, and conservative think tanks. Indeed, the development of informal networks extending beyond the formal institutions of Congress and executive is crucial. (In the book we cite a classic study that shows how Cosimo de Medici used control of informal networks to dominate Florentine politics even though he "never assumed lasting public office" and "hardly gave a public speech.") These informal GOP networks have fostered fairly coordinated actions in a system where checks and balances are supposed to ruthlessly chip away at unified political action.

Coordination is power. It makes it far easier to control the agenda (which is crucial in politics), to stay on message, and to use legislative procedure (as well as even more obscure elements of policymaking) to pursue off-center goals while presenting a moderate face to the public. Coordination helps the GOP divide opponents, and protect potentially vulnerable Republicans from exposure -- as well as shower them with cash if all else fails. At least until recently, this new system has been self-reinforcing. As members of the conservative coalition gained confidence that their leaders could deliver, they became more willing to go along, which made it easier for leaders to deliver, and so on.

We are not saying (and recent events have driven this point home) that the GOP is always unified, or that it can get away with anything even when it is. The unity achieved over the past decade, however, has been both unprecedented and far in excess of anything its opponents have been able to muster. That unity has helped Republicans achieve a surprising degree of electoral and policy success despite moving off center -- a course of action that is supposed to bring a party to ruin.

Maybe, however, as many have argued (both in this discussion and elsewhere) ours is a story of the past, not the present. Is the GOP machine cracking up? That's the topic of our next post.