Going Stronger; What conservatives understand about taxes

Going Stronger; What conservatives understand about taxes

BY: Peter Beinart, The New Republic
DATE: May 21, 2001
SECTION: Page 18
LENGTH: 1170 words

Why isn't there a liberal Grover Norquist? Norquist runs a group called Americans for Tax Reform. But that's not his real job. His real job is to host a meeting every Wednesday that brings together every species of conservative--gun nuts, home schoolers, anti-environmentalists, capital gains tax cutters--to plot strategy. Why is this important?

First, it keeps conservatives on-message. If the White House says America needs a tax cut because the economy is tanking (as opposed to last year, when it said America needed a tax cut because the economy wasn't tanking), Norquist's meeting makes sure everyone is reading from the same script.

Second, Norquist's meeting facilitates inter-conservative back-scratching. It reminds UPS (to take a hypothetical example) to donate money to the Christian Coalition's gay-conversion program so the Christian Coalition will tell its members that federal ergonomics rules violate Judeo-Christian morality.

But, most of all, the meeting helps the conservative movement set priorities. It's through Norquist's conclaves that conservatives learn that the White House isn't going to push for school vouchers, or an immediate increase in defense spending, or a loosening of the arsenic standard. And it's through them that conservatives disgruntled with those decisions are told to play along--or else.

One reason there isn't a liberal Grover Norquist is that Norquist is an unusual guy--shrewd, fanatically committed, catholic in his devotion to all right-wing causes, big and small.

Another is that Norquist has access to money--from corporations looking for tax breaks or freedom from regulation--and that money gives him the leverage to keep fractious conservatives in line.

Liberals don't have an activist of Norquist's stature and savvy. And given their often adversarial relationship to corporations--which provide most of the real money in politics--they don't have his finances, either. But there's a larger reason conservatives have produced a Grover Norquist and liberals haven't: Conservatives have a central, unifying purpose, and liberals, at least right now, do not.

A great deal of ink has been spilled in recent years on the crisis of post-cold-war conservatism. Conservatives no longer have the Soviet Union to define themselves against; they no longer have welfare; they no longer have soft-on-crime liberals. All that is true--but they still have taxes. Economic conservatives may hate taxes because they believe they undermine liberty, and social conservatives may hate taxes because they believe they undermine the family, but both groups hate them with a passion. Norquist understands this, and it's what holds his Wednesday meetings together. It's no coincidence, after all, that the man convening them is first and foremost an anti-tax crusader. His congregants know that while they may occasionally have to cave on education, the environment, or affirmative action, they will all go to the mat on taxes, and a victory on taxes will justify everything else. George W. Bush understands this too. He saw his father, the man who won the Gulf war and nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, nonetheless denounced by conservatives because of his apostasy in raising taxes. And W. has governed accordingly. The tax cut is his number-one priority; number two isn't even close.

This is why Bush, and conservatives, are winning the tax cut battle: They care more. While support for tax cuts is clearly the top priority for conservatives, opposition to tax cuts isn't the top priority for liberals. Ralph Neas, director of People for the American Way, has gamely enlisted an array of liberal groups in a "Fair Taxes for All" coalition. But while Neas may be able to get lots of liberal organizations to say they oppose the tax cut, he can't get them to make it a priority.

Feminist and civil rights groups are hoarding their resources for the fight over judicial nominations.

Environmentalists have taken to the airwaves against Bush's environmental policy, not his budget.

The AFL-CIO is more concerned about permanent normal trading relations with China, Bush's assault on ergonomics rules, and various anti-union guidelines instituted by the Labor Department.

The Naderites care more about stopping the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

You can see the difference between conservative and liberal priorities in the recent budget votes in the House and Senate.

Republicans who opposed the tax cut genuinely feared conservative retribution. And for good reason: As Michael Crowley reported in tnr ("Central Casting," May 14), the Norquist-allied Club for Growth threatened to back primary challengers against GOP moderates who didn't support the president. The result was that every single House Republican voted for Bush's tax cut, and the three Senate Republicans who didn't were the subjects of attack ads in their home states. By contrast, House and Senate Democrats who defected from their party's position to support the tax cut feared--and received--no such retaliation.

You could make a case that taxes shouldn't be the top liberal priority of the Bush era. Or, at least, you could make a case if you had a good alternative. But liberals don't. The alternative favored by culture-war liberals, as far as I can tell, is the judiciary. Last month 42 of the 50 Senate Democrats participated in a retreat at which feminists, civil rights leaders, and academics rallied them against Bush's impending nominations to the courts. (As far as I know, liberals never held a similar event on the tax cut.) Fights over judges are really proxies for fights over abortion and affirmative action. But there's simply no way those identity-politics battles can serve as liberalism's overriding purpose, because they hold little or no appeal to that large chunk of the left motivated by economics. Unlike tax cuts, they are inherently parochial. The alternative focus suggested by the economic left--globalization--is even worse. The unions were clearly more galvanized by the nafta and fast-track fights than they are by the tax cut; and, by sinking Al Gore, the Naderites made it clear they considered his support for free trade more significant than his opposition to tax giveaways for the wealthy. To the extent it is allowed to define left-liberal politics, the anti-globalization movement will wreak political disaster and moral catastrophe. And it will alienate upper-middle-class pro-choicers as much as abortion rights alienates blue-collar hard hats.

Grover Norquist is right: Taxation, defined broadly to encompass government redistribution of wealth, is the central political question of the moment. A tax cut as large as Bush's effectively predetermines how government will (or will not) respond to a vast array of other issues--entitlements, defense policy, environmental regulation, health care, education, welfare, you name it. Conservatives understand this. Liberals, for the most part, don't. And that's why conservatives are winning.