If Grover Norquist is to be believed, all the Republican Party needs to regain its dominance of the American political scene is to wait for more freedom lovers to be born – squeezed out primarily by Mormons and Orthodox Jews – while the Hillary Clinton-style tax-and-spenders die off with the Greatest Generation. As Norquist writes, the GOP’s two best friends would be “the obstetrician and the mortician.”
If only.
Norquist is not a naive man. He and his group, Americans for Tax Reform, have long been on the cutting edge of grassroots conservative movement that took over Washington from 1994 to 2004. He’s even well-acquainted with the tackier side of coalition politics: A Senate report in 2006 fingered his group as having accepted large cash contributions from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in return for helping his clients.
Yet, somehow, his latest book manages to diagnose and prescribe treatment for the ills of the modern-day Republican Party with hardly a mention of the tumor in its guts: Bush-Rove-style Big Government Conservatism.
Norquist breaks down modern political actors into two camps: the Leave Us Alone Coalition and the Takings Coalition. The Leave Us Alone Coalition, he says, consists of taxpayers (the ones who want lower taxes, anyway) businessmen, property owners, gun owners, homeschoolers and conservative religious types threatened by the secular mainstream – Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Mormons. The Takings Coalition consists of government workers, labor unions, trial lawyers, welfare recipients and much of academia – or, as Norquist puts it, folks who “raise your taxes to subsidize Piss Christ while explaining that your church cannot be used for child care until you cover up all those icky crucifixes.”
But has the Republican Party of the last 10 years really been under the sway of a Leave Me Alone Coalition? Far from it. That’s the sort of coalition libertarian Republicans wish they had, but it’s certainly not what’s existed in practice.
In practice, what we’ve seen is the emergence of a new breed of Republican – what the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press calls “pro-government conservatives.” They’ve made up about a third of the Republican coalition under President Bush and have taken a seat alongside economic and social conservatives at the GOP table. These conservatives (if such a term should even be applied to them) are essentially populists – uneducated, economically insecure and quite insistent that the government should transfer money to the poor and to provide goods such as health care.
It’s no coincidence that under our current Republican president the GOP has vastly expanded the federal role in local schools while tripling federal education spending (No Child Left Behind), added a monumentally expensive drug benefit to Medicare, slapped protectionist tariffs on steel and other goods, instituted onerous new regulations on US corporations and passed some of the most pork-laden budgets in history.
What’s more, it seems rather spurious to include today’s Religious Right under the rubric of the Leave Me Alone Coalition. If conservative religious voters were only after the right to homeschool, then, sure, it’d be fair enough. But today’s Religious Right is hell-bent, above all else, on writing discrimination against gays into the Constitution – overriding states that have begun to move toward accommodating gay relationships with either civil unions or full-fledged marriage. They are, in fact, the ones who need to learn to leave others alone.
The truth is that today’s GOP is much less a Leave Me Alone Coalition than it is a Keep Me Safe Coalition, where its members variously want to be kept safe from terrorists, gays and immigrants (not to mention gay immigrant terrorists).
Now, there may be hope of moving away from the current Keep Me Safe Coalition and closer to something like what Norquist describes as an America “richer, more mobile, with new jobs, new industries and new technologies, and without the dead weight of government.” A growing investor class, made up of citizen shareholders, could broaden support for free-market policies.
And Norquist’s policy prescriptions are good so far as they go: private Social Security accounts, Health Savings Accounts, more government transparency. But you can’t get from Point A to Point B if you pretend we’re already there.
Leave Us Alone
Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives
by Grover G. Norquist
William Morrow