by F.R. Duplantier
Containing the threat, refuting the notion that its triumph was inevitable, seizing the moral high ground, defunding the enemy -- these tactics toppled the Soviet empire and won the Cold War. They could also put an end to Big Government in America.
"The old Republican coalition of northerners, big business, farmers, and professionals has given way to a modern Republican coalition of individuals and groups who share a common goal: They all want to be left alone by the government," says Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform in the May issue of Imprimis, the monthly publication of Hillsdale College. This "Leave Us Alone" coalition consists of taxpayers, property owners, small businessmen, gun owners, home schoolers, and other pro-family, traditional values conservatives -- all of whom want government out of their pockets and off their backs.
"The Left as embodied in the Democratic Party is a 'Takings' coalition," says Norquist, "made up of groups that want the government to take things -- usually money -- from other Americans and give it to them. This coalition includes government workers, unions, government contractors, corrupt big-city machines, federal grant recipients, left-wing intellectuals, and both wings of the `dependency lobby' (those locked into welfare dependency and those who earn a handsome living managing that deliberately never-ending dependency)." This coalition is also home to "the radical utopians who wish to use the power of the state to restructure society. They include the radical leaders of the feminist, homosexual, environmentalist, and animal rights movements."
The "Takings" coalition is shrinking. The "Leave Us Alone" coalition, on the other hand, continues to grow, built, as it is, "around a single political principle consistent with American history and tradition -- that government should be limited and the people free." Norquist says this coalition has "embarked consciously on a four-part strategy to defeat the Washington establishment and the old Democratic majority. It is the same strategy that successfully broke the back of the Soviet empire."
As it applies to Big Government in America, containment means firm opposition to tax increases. Norquist notes that more and more of our elected representatives are getting on the tax-ban bandwagon. As for inevitability, it's not the triumph of socialism that looms before us, but "devolution of power to the states, a private Social Security system, school choice, and welfare reform." The Right succeeded in seizing the moral high ground with "principled opposition to the welfare state's destruction of lives." Defunding the enemy is all that remains. "Conservatives," Norquist observes, "are beginning to cut off the flow of tax-payer funds and coerced labor union dues to the Left."
"Freedom is on the march around the globe," says Norquist. "There is a great deal of work to be done, but the imperial city of Washington will fall to the forces of freedom just as Moscow did. It is as hollow, as brittle, and as bereft of self-confidence. The 'Leave Us Alone' coalition is growing, and it is fighting on the winning side of history."
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