Culture Of Conservatism

by digby

Frank Rich’s column today is getting lots of attention as it should. It’s great. But I have to take issue with one passage:

Real conservatives, after all, are opposed to Big Brother; even the staunch Bush ally Grover Norquist has criticized the N.S.A.’s overreaching.

Norquist isn’t a “real conservative.” In fact, there is no such thing as a real conservative in the Party or movement leadership. The only “real conservatives” left are regular citizens, a few scholars and a couple of pundits.

This is an easy trap to fall into. Whenever their leaders inevitably suck the treasury dry, usurp the constitution, turn America into an international pariah (you know, the usual) “conservatives” protect their valuable brand by simply saying that these particular leaders weren’t really “conservative” after all.

Grover Norquist believes in one thing and one thing only — the perpetuation of Republican power. His job is managing the leaders of the GOP base — which he fatuously calls “the leave us alone” coalition:

The Leave Us Alone Coalition is an idea popularized by conservative/libertarian activist Grover Norquist for a wide-ranging and loose collaboration among various elements of U.S. politics, united by a common desire for minimal involvement with and restrictions from government, especially the U.S. federal government. There is no actual organization by this name, rather, it is a description of a hoped-for reality of cooperation between social conservatives, libertarians / free market supporters, and various single-issue voters such as gun rights supporters.

He has to say that he opposes the NSA wiretaps if he hopes to keep this political devil’s bargain together. Here’s what Norquist is really all about:

“The Republicans are looking at decades of dominance in the House and Senate, and having the presidency with some regularity,” Norquist told the New York Times last week. A few days earlier, he made the same point, with slightly less confidence, to CNBC Washington bureau chief and Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray: “For the next 10 years in the House and Senate, we’re looking at Republican control.” In the Washington Post last month, Norquist wrote of a “guarantee of united Republican government” that “has allowed the Bush administration to work and think long-term.”

[…]

[I]n the November 1992 American Spectator, he wrote an article titled “The Coming Clinton Dynasty,” in which he admitted that “any vision of conservatism as the ultimate winner in a two-steps-forward, one-step back Leninist march, is a flawed one.”

Instead, Norquist explained, the way a party ensures its perpetual dominance is by controlling the levers of power. In 1974, Watergate led to the election of 75 new Democrats in the House. In Norquist’s view, “this liberal band of congressmen” was “willing to change the rules to ensure their continuation in power.” Without the benefits of incumbency (bigger staffs, larger budgets, taxpayer-funded mail, pork, and the ability to “extort campaign contributions from industries”), Norquist argued, the Democrats could not have remained in office for the subsequent 18 years. Power perpetuates itself. The correctness of conservative ideas paled before the ruthless “minority ideological cabal” in Congress.

It’s shocking that such a delusional person is so influential in American politics, but he is. And despite his rare faux libertarian statements of principle he quite clearly desires a permanent Republican state endowed with unlimited power. He just worries that someone he disagrees with might try to do the same thing. I don’t think that’s conservatism. He’s just a good old authoritarian statist. Here’s Grover on his idol Josef Stalin:

He was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got an ice ax through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.

This article in the WaPo from January 2004 on Grover is very entertaining and informative. I particularly liked this part:

Some conservatives have stopped attending the meetings because, they say, the institution has “gone Beltway.” Now that Republicans are in power, the emphasis has shifted from ideology to lobbying for rich clients, they say. At one session, former representative Bob Livingston (R-La.) promoted a telecom client. At another, former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating (R) talked to the audience as president of the American Council of Life Insurers. One coalition dropout dismissed Norquist as a “homo economicus” — driven by market forces rather than by social issues.

Part of the reason for “having the personnel in place,” of course, is to ensure that money is funnelled where it needs to be. And Grover, along with his best pals from the College Republicans, Abramoff and Reed, made sure that this happened. Norquit’s name has already come up in the Abramoff proble and I would expect it to come up again. He’s right in the middle of that mess.

But why wouldn’t he be? As you can see from the quote above, he believes that corruption is the method by which a political party maintains power. And there is nothing Grover cares about more than maintaining power.

Basically, he ascribes to George W. Bush’s political ideology:

“If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator,”

There you have it; modern conservatism in a nutshell.

Update: For more evidence of the mindset, check this out from Josh Marshall:

You have to love this. Three and a half years ago members of the New Hampshire state Republican party, the Republican National Committee and others entered into a criminal conspiracy to disrupt Democratic get-out-the-vote activities on election day.

[…]

Now, in recently filed court papers, the Republican State Committee’s attorney, Ovide Lamontagne, is claiming that the Dems’ suit is “in attempt to use the court system to interfere with the (GOP’s) constitutionally protected election activities.” There’s a certain amount of sense to this, I suppose, since the Republican party, in its current incarnation, does seem to rely heavily on law-breaking as an electoral tool. Still, I’ve never heard it alleged that such criminality is constitutionally protected

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