Grover Norquist popped in to Ralph Nader’s right left convergence conference earlier this week and gave a 12 minute talk that focused on the possibilities of right left coalitions.
Norquist was introduced by Nader, who said that Norquist “changes incumbents’ performance even if they come from safe districts.”
“With his tax pledges, which I disagree with, he has gotten a majority of Republicans to sign a pledge of no taxes even though they don’t fear losing elections because most of them are from gerrymandered districts,” Nader said. “They have plenty of money.”
“The question we want to address is — how do we change incumbents minds?” Nader asked. “And how do we change who sits there after elections?”
The Nader conference was scheduled to coincide with the release of Nader’s new book — Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State (Nation Books, 2014). Today, the book received an initial positive review from Timothy Noah in the Washington Post. Noah writes that Nader “holds more beliefs in common with conservatives than is generally recognized.”
At the conference, Norquist differentiated between left right coalitions and bipartisanship, which he defined as “established Republicans and Democrats getting together and saying — we can work together and be bipartisan. How about we take an extra dollar and give it to the Pentagon and then you take an extra dollar and give it to HUD. And we’ll all be bipartisan. They can agree on that all day. That’s how we got where we are.”
“You have heard the expression — there is a stupid party and there is an evil party. Most people say the evil party is the one they are not in. They say they are too stupid to be the evil party. But there is something to be said for that because every once in a while, the stupid party and the evil party get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. And they call it bipartisanship.”
“That’s not what Ralph or I are talking about,” Norquist said. “That’s not what we mean by left right coalitions. The muddled middle finds it very easy to step across the partisanship line and agree on their class interests as politicians. They like pay increases. They like pensions. They don’t like transparency. They like opaque government. They like rules in the House and Senate to make it difficult to determine who the hell touched the ball last before it went out of bounds.”
Norquist laid out a number of areas he believed left and right could work together — corporate welfare being one.
“The right thinks evil government is polluting the nice corporations,” Norquist said. “The left believes that the nice government is being polluted by the evil corporations. But we can both agree that there is a corrupt transaction going on here. Who is corrupt in the first place and who got corrupted is another issue for debate. The guys in the muddled middle don’t mind those transactions. But the guys on the right and left tend to object to that sort of behavior.”