Revealed! How the Republican Party really works (and why Hillary will be the nominee, and…)

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Our man in Washington, Jim Ridgeway, filed a dispatch last week reporting on a breakfast with conservative political guru Grover Norquist (about whom there’s lots more in Michael Scherer’s Mother Jones profile). Now you, too, can be transported to the American Prospect-sponsored meeting via the magic of audio. Grab some coffee and refrigerator-cold Danishes to recreate the setting, put up your feet, and listen to Norquist explain how the right manages to hold together a “low-maintenance coalition” of gun owners, home schoolers, businesses (not including the kind who want big government subsidies—that’s a different coalition) and various faith activists, by catering to them on only their “primary vote-moving issues” and to hell with all the rest.

On the issue that moves their vote, what they want from the government is to be left alone. They want to be left alone to practice their religion and raise their kids in that faith and not have schools throwing prophylactics at kids etc. That’s why on the right, we’re able to have evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals, as well as conservative Catholics and conservative Muslims and orthodox Jews etc. who may not agree on who goes to heaven and why, but they understand that if they are to have the right to raise their kids and go to heaven, the pagans over there have to have the same right to raise their kids to go to Hades.

So you’ve got Pat Buchanan and others saying there are all these fissures, on secondary and tertiary issues. But on the primary vote-moving issues, everyone has their foot in the center and they’re not in conflict on anything. The guy who wants to spend all day counting his money, the guy who wants to spend all day fondling his weaponry, and the guy who wants to be in church all day, may look at each other and say, “Well that’s pretty weird, and that’s not what I want to do with my spare time, but that does not threaten my ability to go to church, have my guns, have my property, run my business, home school my kids.

And this handily helps explain why Republicans are the tax-and-spend party these days:

Spending is not a problem because it’s not a primary vote-moving issue for anyone in the coalition. If you keep everybody happy on their primary issue and disappoint on a secondary issue, everyone grumbles, but no one walks out the door.

Bonus: How the left works, according to Norquist:

The way I see the vote-moving parts of the left, it’s trial lawyers with resources, it’s organized labor with resources, it’s the two wings of the dependency movement—people who are locked into welfare and people who make $90,000 making sure they stay there—and what we cheerfully call the “coercive utopians” who spend their time telling us that toilets have to be too small to flush and cars have to be too small to have kids.

More (including Norquist responding to questions on his friend Jack Abramoff, on Social Security (“The otherwise very intelligent people at the White House made an error”), on Hillary and the Republican presidential field, on why the Republicans have kept the House and Senate election after election, and what Dems should say on the war:

The best position for Democratic Party is to stand here and go ‘Bush and Iraq, how do you like that?’ And then shut up. It’s like the old joke, ‘How’s your wife?’ ‘Compared to what?’ I know that there’s this constant conversation, we’ve got to get a theme and all that, and at some point Republicans will say Democrats don’t have any answers. But if you’ve had a problem hung around your neck, ‘They don’t have any answers’ doesn’t work as well.

In that spirit (and because a great debate, along with things like this, reminds us of what we love about America), go have a good Fourth.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate