W. JAMES ANTLE III : All Taxpayers Left Alone
Norquist, Grover G.
books In RevIeW All Taxpayers Left Alone I n the course of a long New Yorker profile of John McCain, Ryan Lizza stopped to survey the latest literature on how Republicans can escape...
...The right needs a different vision than that of the me-too Republicans or the compassionate conservatives to pull off another economic death-defying feat...
...Each time conservatives reversed or even just slowed the growth of the federal government, they first had to defeat members of the Republican Party who wanted to accommodate the statist drift...
...Norquist’s lively manifesto should encourage them not to give up the fight...
...Can conservatives once again rescue taxpayers from the Europeanization of the American economy...
...Yet just as there is no monolithic Hispanic vote, as the author notes, there is no single Hispanic opinion on immigration policy...
...Border hawks become a liability when they descend into blanket anti-Hispanic hostility...
...Norquist quips, “If you are acquainted with a woman earning more than $75,000 who doesn’t have stock, don’t give her any as it doesn’t do any good...
...Norquist is perhaps best known for the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge...
...Norquist cites a 1997 Rasmussen poll showing that “owning at least $5,000 in stock made one 18.54 percent more likely to be Republican and less likely to be a Democrat...
...Private-sector labor unions are in decline while the number of Americans who own stock—the investor class—is on the upswing...
...As readers of this magazine might expect, Grover Norquist’s new book is a happy exception...
...Other, more recent research has tended to corroborate these findings...
...But the author argues that the demographic trends in this area are favorable nevertheless...
...Conservative talk radio may not be the best medium through which to reach the independent voters who swung heavily against the GOP in the last election...
...70 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008...
...In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and his congressional allies rescinded energy price controls, accelerated deregulation, slashed marginal tax rates, and indexed tax brackets to inflation...
...N orquist’s conception of American politics isn’t a bad place to start...
...So, you say “tomato,” and at least one influential figure at Esalen says, “Lose your mind and come to your senses...
...When it comes to the growth of the leviathan, some conservatives would like to replace the old rallying cry of standing athwart history yelling stop with the schoolyard cliché, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em...
...Even George W. Bush, in a 1999 speech no doubt penned by self-described heroic conservative Michael Gerson, warned against a political philosophy with “no higher goal, no nobler purpose than ‘leave us alone.’” “When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, less than 20 percent of American households owned stock directly,” Norquist writes...
...Whether it is GOP politicians presenting the federal government as a defender of traditional values rather than an aggressor against them or free-market advocates accepting the largest new entitlement program since the Great Society, it sometimes seems as if we are all big-government conservatives now...
...These voters will trend toward the Leave Us Alone Coalition to protect their communities and also because the secular Takings Coalition will push them out...
...the Christians can agree not to steal anyone’s guns...
...books In RevIeW All Taxpayers Left Alone I n the course of a long New Yorker profile of John McCain, Ryan Lizza stopped to survey the latest literature on how Republicans can escape electoral oblivion...
...Nor was it a Democrat who derided supply-side tax cuts as “voodoo economics...
...But these advantages were not enough to prevent Republican losses in 2006 or halt the recent rise in Democratic Party identification...
...But for an enlightened few at a small New Age mecca situated on the coastal cliffs of Big Sur, California, it is hallucinogen-induced conversations with elf-like (perhaps insectoid) presences, mini pseudo-race riots, gaggles of men sitting atop other men to simulate “emotional constriction,” altered-state visions, and life cues discerned from bird droppings...
...Revise that to say “the limited government ethos that has come to define conservatism,” and he has a point...
...Play it again, Sam: Even if the Democrats do not get a dime of their 2008 big-government wish list, Washington’s slice of the gross domestic product will double just by leaving federal entitlement programs on autopilot...
...The area, with its natural hot spring baths and outlaw attitude, was already well known in counterculture circles...
...APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 69 books In RevIeW W hile the policy proposals in Leave Us Alone are uniformly sound, Norquist’s analysis might occasionally be overly optimistic...
...A t least twice before in our nation’s history, the United States stood at the precipice of becoming a full-blown, European-style welfare state...
...Lizza noted that several of these books “reject the anti-government ethos that has come to define conservatism...
...The right simply does not dominate the web the way it does talk radio...
...It wasn’t a Democratic administration that imposed wage and price controls during the 1970s...
...If nothing is done,” Norquist writes, “even if no new taxes are raised, no new spending programs invented, the simple growth of federal government spending driven by the existing entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and the aging of the baby boomers will drive federal spending from 20 percent of the economy to 40 percent by 2050...
...Buy her a gun instead...
...and they all can agree not to take anyone’s property...
...Norquist isn’t “anti-government,” as he would be the first to tell you...
...Such advice couldn’t come at a better time...
...Many on the right are willing to pronounce the era of limited government over before it really begins...
...Today 50 percent of households own stock and two-thirds of all voters in the past two elections were shareholders...
...Daily Kos is well ahead of most conservative sites in this regard...
...For others, it is rugged individualism with minimal state coercion or intervention...
...There is also the risk of a conservative echo chamber that can make it harder for Republicans to stay in touch with people outside the base...
...An even bigger challenge than diversifying the conservative coalition is keeping Republicans from playing for the other team...
...The creation of individual retirement accounts, 401(k)s, and other new investment tools increased the number of Americans who owned stock directly...
...He pits the Leave Us Alone Coalition—a center-right group of anti-tax activists, gun-rights defenders, homeschoolers, and religious conservatives more interested in being free of government mandates than waging culture wars—against the Takings Coalition, made up of all the liberals who (as the subtitle suggests) want the government’s hands on our money, guns, and lives...
...The GOP legislators who controlled what Harry Truman called the “Do Nothing Congress” of 1947–48 blocked national health insurance, repealed wartime price controls and food stamp programs, and enacted Taft-Hartley...
...Each time, conservative Republicans yanked the American people back from the cliff...
...He would have the GOP become leave Us Alone: getting the government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our guns, Our lives by Grover G. Norquist (HarperCollins, 338 pages, $26.95) Reviewed by W. James Antle III the Taxpayer Protection Party...
...Norquist worries that Republicans will lose the Hispanic vote for generations if Tom Tancredo isn’t deported from the party...
...It is true that this has greatly benefited the right, which is why the left wants to “hush Rush” by reinstating the Fairness Doctrine...
...Conservative websites attract a large number of visitors, but liberals have excelled at online political organization...
...Jack Kerouac visited only to be turned off by “a dead otter bobbing shawn Macomber, a recent Phillips Foundation journalism fellow, is a contributing editor to The American Spectator...
...68 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 The Leave Us Alone Coalition came under attack in the late 1990s, not just by liberals who didn’t want to leave anyone alone but also by conservatives with visions of “national greatness” and Washington-managed “compassion” dancing in their heads...
...There’s no statecraft as soulcraft in Leave Us Alone...
...But Norquist provides a more marketable—which is to say, more compelling—response than that, and recommends conservatives come up with a strategy to limit government again...
...Norquist has fittingly titled his latest Leave Us Alone, named after the voting blocs he has long argued could create an enduring center-right elec toral majority...
...That is why conservatives should rush to revive the Leave Us Alone Coalition, not bury it...
...For example, he devotes an entire chapter to the growth of the conservative new media...
...That leaves plenty of room for a strong national defense and the maintenance of law and order, but doesn’t empower every bureaucrat with designs on the taxpayer’s paycheck...
...Even George W. Bush, in a 1999 speech no doubt penned by self-described heroic conservative Michael Gerson, warned against a political philosophy with “no higher goal, no nobler purpose than ‘leave us alone.’ ” To which a curmudgeonly anti-statist might be tempted to reply, “Well, it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, dammit...
...Utopia Road F or some, utopia is a land with corporate taxes high enough to make the social safety net look more like a hammock...
...This is the real bridge to nowhere...
...Public policies can grow the investor class...
...W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator...
...A bit of background: Shortly after a Stanford faculty “not well disposed to…metaphysical interests” deep-sixed his hopes of a doctorate in philosophy in the mid-1950s, young Michael Murphy co-founded the Esalen Institute with Richard Price to jumpstart mankind’s next evolution...
...But excessive unskilled immigration can also retard Hispanic upward mobility, making these voters ripe for the Takings...
...This, in turn, Norquist argues, makes it easier for conservatives to convince people that tax increases on business and other anti-market measures hurt the employee’s bottom line as well...
...Younger students are increasingly being homeschooled...
...the gun owners can agree not to raise everyone else’s taxes...
...Once again, America is veering dangerously close to European social democracy...
...The problem is not just the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts or the $287 billion in new spending proposed by the books In RevIeW Democratic presidential front-runner...
...For Norquist, politics is purely a defensive measure...
...Conservative communities of faith— including evangelicals, Mormons, traditionalist Catholics, and orthodox Jews—have high rates of birth or conversion...
...He, like the coalition he urges the Republican Party to cultivate, “simply wants properly limited government that plays a role in protecting the life, liberty, and property of citizens...
...It is not as easy for a Republican government to expand the religious right, although many of Norquist’s rival conservative reformers counsel natalist policies...
...Red states are generally growing while blue states are mostly shrinking...
...collegiate conservatives are being trained by the movement...
...Henry Miller had lived there, commemorating his stay in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch...
...As Norquist once memorably explained, “Conservative leaders can meet in a room, and the taxpayers can agree not to throw condoms at the children of Christians and orthodox Jews...
...Despite the 2006 elections and the equally discouraging 2008 polls, Norquist sees several trends in favor of the Leave Us Alone Coalition...
...And this year’s elections may well be a boon to those who want to see federal spending commitments grow even further, not shrink...
...Liberal Republicans in the 1940s and ’50s preferred a dime- store New Deal to a Do Nothing Congress...
...This is true regardless of income—in fact, the highest income groups were the least likely to become Republican because of stock ownership...
...One could also make the case that there was a third close call, when a Republican congressional minority beat back Hillarycare in 1994...
...While the impact of the netroots can be exaggerated, the left has certainly done a good job of raising money and promoting candidates through the web...
...Admittedly, my case here is more utopian than actual,” Kripal writes, and as in the case of the sailor-philosopher Raphael Nonsenso, who even while enumerating the Esalen: America and the wonders of collectivism religion of No religion in Thomas More’s Utopia by Jeffrey J. Kripal could not help but snipe (University of CHiCago press, at the multitudes off its 594 pages, $30) shoreswho“haveentered into an idiotic conspirReviewed by shawn Macomber acy to call some things enjoyable which are naturally nothing of the kind,” the vision of Esalen is no doubt considerably more appealing to the messenger than the masses...
...With the exception of Ron Paul, Republicans have often lagged in Internet fundraising...
...It’s just a minor difference of sociotheological opinion that Rice University Religious Studies Professor Jeffrey J. Kripal attempts to overcome with his exhaustive history/cheerleading endorsement, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
