Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, has a disturbing obsession with Communist metaphors and tactics. According to David Brock, Norquist keeps a portrait of Lenin and frequently quotes Lenin's saying "Probe with bayonets, looking for weaknesses." And in a New Yorker profile this week, Norquist compares his efforts to take over the country via democratic means with a Communist-style revolution -- maybe the comment is supposed to be sarcastic, but I find it disturbing:
[Norquist] talked about how to build a broad coalition. "If you want the votes of people who are good on guns, good on taxes, and good on faith issues, that is a very small intersection of voters," he said. "But if you say, Give me the votes of anybody who agrees with you on any of these issues, that's a much bigger section of the population." To illustrate what he meant, Norquist drew three intersecting circles over a piece of paper. In the first one he wrote "guns," in the second he wrote "taxes," in the third he wrote "faith." There was a small area where the circles intersected. "With that group, you can take over the country, starting with the airports and the radio stations," he said. "But with all of the three circles that's sixty percent of the population, and you can win politically."
This is hardly the only example of the parallels that are explicitly drawn by conservatives. A 1983 Cato article (PDF) lays out a "Leninist strategy" for privatizing Social Security. Liberals could never get away with this stuff.
Comments