Let’s see what Professor of Political Science and holder of the Avice Saint Chair of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley Paul Pierson has to say to students at UC Berkley.

Here are some highlights from an interview regarding Pierson’s book Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy extracted from globetrotter.berkley.edu.

• “I’m not going to pretend that I would be ecstatic about a government that was pursuing conservative policies”

• “By off center we mean that there is a disconnect between where public opinion seems to be and where public authority seems to be headed. That’s why the subtitle of the book is The Erosion of American Democracy. It’s not just because liberals object to what the conservative majority might be doing, but because it seems to reflect a breakdown of responsiveness and accountability.”

• It’s important to set the stage that in 2000 and 2001 there was no evidence in public opinion polls that people were chomping at the bit for a big tax cut.

• The impeachment of President Clinton, which it’s very clear public opinion did not favor. Public opinion had settled strongly on a way to resolve that clash, which was a vote of censure. Republicans were quite aggressive on the issue and simply refused to allow — this is an example of agenda control — they refused to allow a vote of censure to come to the floor of the House. They instead pursued a different course which every poll showed was not what the American public wanted.

• The core argument of the book, which I think broadly has been pretty well accepted, is that neither Reagan or Thatcher really succeeded, although there was a lot of hue and cry around the time. [Neither] of them succeeded in fundamentally changing the structure of social policy because of the political challenges that they faced in doing that, and the fact that when they were very aggressive about it there tended to be a pretty strong popular outcry. In the Unites States, for example, Reagan is elected, begins to talk about cuts in Social Security, and there’s such a strong outcry against it that it plays an important role in the fact that Republicans lost twenty-six seats in the 1982 midterm elections, and that pretty much ended the conversation of a radical reform of Social Security.

Now, who says College professors ever push liberal indoctrination?

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