Grover Norquist: The Least Courageous Man in Politics
By Nick Rodriguez, newly minted Contributing Writer
As America returns to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, Congress and the president return to pick up the pieces from last week’s supercommittee failure. Many factors led to the breakdown in negotiations, but one recurrent theme is the refusal of the Republicans on the committee to raise any net new taxes.
The anti-tax orthodoxy among conservatives is well-known, and it has been on full display this year, as Democrats and Republicans cut two prior deals – on the budget in the spring and the debt ceiling in the summer – that included over $1 trillion in spending cuts without a dime of additional tax revenue. The priest of this orthodoxy is Grover Norquist, the keeper of the famous “taxpayer protection pledge” that binds nearly every Republican member of Congress (and all six Republicans on the failed supercommittee) to never vote to raise taxes under any circumstances.
I envy Grover Norquist. Not because he’s a successful political tactician (though he is), nor because of the sway he holds over half of official Washington. No, I envy Grover Norquist because his job is so very easy.
Most activists trying to mobilize voters have to do two things: activate those who already agree with them, and persuade more to join the cause. The latter can be challenging. Public policy, by its very nature, involves tradeoffs between multiple good things. At its best, voter education is about explaining these tradeoffs and convincing people to give up one good thing for another. Your taxes will go up, but your schools will be better. This set of public services will be eliminated, but the money is better left in your pockets than spent for this particular purpose. And so on.
Not so with Norquist and the anti-tax movement. Theirs is a public policy stance with no tradeoffs at all. As far as they are concerned, the government is stealing from you when it levies taxes, and the thievery must stop (this is their metaphor, not mine). Norquist is essentially offering us our money back. And really, who wouldn’t want that?
It would be a nice narrative if it were true. But in fact, every decision to lower taxes is a decision to cut some service that the government provides, now or in the future. The genius of people like Norquist has been their success in decoupling these two questions. Take your tax breaks now, they say, without any mention of the potential costs in the future. As a result, we are having a conversation about spending cuts in 2011 that we should have had in 2001, when the tax cuts that helped create these deficits were signed into law.
In this sense, Norquist and the anti-tax movement have something in common with the subprime loan sharks who also helped cause the current crisis: they cater to our greed and tell us we can have it all, hoping all the while that we won’t read the fine print. Which brings me back to why Norquist’s job is so easy. It takes not one bit of courage – and not a great deal of skill either – to appeal to the basest and most selfish of instincts in each of us, to demand nothing more from us than that we guard our pocketbooks and seek to enrich ourselves.
Conservatives are better than this. The modern conservative movement was founded to defend individual liberties, to instill a healthy skepticism of what government can and should undertake, and to urge caution about the pace of societal change. But now, because Norquist and his ilk have been so successful, the movement seems on the verge of trading in these noble principles for much smaller, narrower, and meaner aims.
I pray that it would not be so. This ideology of naked self-interest has ensnared most of the Republican party and is poisoning our body politic. If it wins out entirely, we can expect last week’s supercommittee failure to be just the beginning of the dysfunction that is in store for us. And if, as citizens, we let it happen, then perhaps we will have the government we deserve.
Nick Rodriguez is a nonprofit leader in the field of education policy and practice.
”It takes not one bit of courage – and not a great deal of skill either – to appeal to the basest and most selfish of instincts in each of us”
You took the words right out of my mouth. This Norquist guy is an idiot because in my opinion, him along with like-minded conservatives assume a non-evolutionary human condition. In other words, implicit to people like him is a mistaken assumption that people are stupid and will remain so with little to no chance of positive evolutionary change really.
People like this and staunch conservatives in general assume an absolute metaphysical reality. That is the basis of their entire political philosophy coupled so very nicely with organized religious philosophy. To spare us from the eternal metaphysical debate here because frankly, we would be debating for eternity, I just want to point out that usually conservatives and really, self-centered, greed-driven, and selfish people will only think in absolute terms. Their mind for a lack of a better term, has allowed them to only perceive reality as if it is absolute, black and white. However, the truth and many truths of the matter is that the post-modern world makes no room for such narrow, limited minds. We have an array of a spectrum of possibility in this forcefully mysterious existence. Don’t believe me? Watch what Quantum Physics is doing everyday (the particle collider) revealing more and more that the world is an ever-changing, non-physical environment never fixed in place like religion, classical philosophy, and modern science has made it out to be. Instead, it is a reality of possibility and probability that humans with an innate capacity to actualize infinite possibility and probability into one single point and action exists.
With all the advancements occurring in this exponential, rapidly changing world, how can someone like Grover Norquist ever last? I guess as long as stupid people exist who refuse to open their minds up beyond the black and white shades of reality. I’m a firm believer that the only way to see real political change is for each and every single individual to stop looking outside themselves for the answers to their existence, and to take a hard look in the mirror when one is ascribing blame and responsibility. Unfortunately, most people defer responsibility of one’s existence over to GOD or someone of authority so that they can remain safely hidden from blame and responsibility when something really goes wrong or awry. Oh and of course, the existential and intense fear that exists in life, seemingly, with no real comfortable answer to sooth the spirit and psyche will do wonders convincing someone of anything if it means feeling safer.
Grover Norquist feeds off this human weakness, along with religious zealots, the all-consuming fear that leads us astray all the time. People like Norquist know this. That is their genius-a firm understanding of how reality works, taking the Machiavellian approach with people. People need to wake up and have the strength to say that GOD may or may not exist but I don’t need the concept to live a Good life, that a righteous life genuinely exists but can be done without absolute morality, and that reality and this existence can forever be a mystery, much like the willingly undiscovereable mind. Otherwise, there will be individuals like Norquist and everyday citizens that can’t figure out why the politicians he/she voted for turned out to be exactly the opposite of what they preached during campaign.
Until people take full responsibility for their existence and life, and take a stand within themselves to never be a sucker, even a sucker to yourself, then we are fucked and Norquist will reign supreme. My biggest hope lies in the fact that humans in general and men of power have misunderstood what real power is. A consensus among the people and a vibrant indefinite debate to decide the consensus is democracy and that is power. That is where the world is going more and more every day. Do people want to be greedy in their temporary lives, high and mighty with false power, or do they want to open themselves up to the future? Do people want to remain indefinitely ignorant or can they be ready for a world with a whole new understanding of power and life. I welcome that world with open arms in excitement. The degenerate and destructive are there to remind us that change is needed and that change for the better is always possible. Are we willing to become engaged and proactive citizens of Life and evolve? I guess the real question to ask at this junction point is are we really Hobbesian or Lockean? Maybe neither. Time will tell…
Forget about Grover Norquist. Instead, call out the lawmakers who signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge in violation of Rule 6 of the Code of Ethics for Government Service. Rule 6 admonishes lawmakers to “Make no private promises of any kind binding upon the duties of office…” Call on the Ethics Committees to censure all lawmakers who signed this Pledge. Read about the Code of Ethics for Government Service at Page 20 and Page 436 of the House and Senate Ethics Manuals, respectively.