Grover Norquist - president, Americans for Tax Reform; president, Americans Against a National Sales Tax/VAT; national leader of the "No New Taxes" pledge for political candidates; economist and chief speechwriter, U.S. Chamber of Commerce 1983-84; economic advisor to Jonas Savimbi, UNITA; B.A. Harvard College 1974-78; Harvard Business School 1979-1981, M.B.A.

 I think we're winning. I think their team is losing. And I think if we do our job right over the next ten years, we're going to have ten years or more where we have a lot of fun and they have a rather unpleasant time of it. It's only going to get more fun for us and less fun for them.

I call as witnesses to the idea or suggestion that we are winning the recent suggestions that have been put forth that the Republicans, or conservatives, ought to nominate Colin Powell, because everybody's so unhappy with all of the candidates.

Well, this is coming from the same establishment left --- Time and Newsweek, that pushed Bill Clinton. We expect them to be unhappy with Dole and Gramm and Alan Keyes and all the Republicans, but they're now announcing that they're disgusted with Clinton, and that means we should all be equally unhappy with all candidates.

You remember what happened in 1980. The left tired of Carter, or the establishment tired of Carter. It was embarrassed by him. We were all excited about Reagan. They announced in the pages of Time and Newsweek and the Washington Post that people were unhappy with both candidates. Well, they were unhappy with their candidate; we were ecstatically happy with our candidate. But back then they at least said it was the Democratic candidate for president that they were unhappy with. Now they're unhappy with the Democratic Party as even the vehicle to run their candidate.

So they're offering Powell to us. They're saying, the Democratic president is flawed and the Democratic Party is not even a vehicle through which you could run a campaign. So they're suggesting to us that we go with Powell. People who say, in the middle of the game, "Let's not keep score," are losing.

Democrat pollster Stan Greenberg said, "Well, you see, the Republican party fell apart in 1972, and the Democrat party fell apart in 1994, and basically both parties have fallen apart and they're equally in trouble. Now we'll sort of build from there." This is the observation of somebody in Berlin in 1945 who explains, "I think both sides are tired of this war, and I think we'll call it off." They are looking from a sinking ship and extrapolating from there that everybody else is also sinking.

I would further call 140 witnesses to this idea, and these are the 140 elected officials who have switched parties since Bill Clinton was elected president; eighty-nine since November of 1994. This is a rather significant situation. This is not a poll.

Morton Blackwell often talks about the difference between preferences and intensity. You want intensity? This isn't answering a poll, "Who do you think is winning?" This isn't voting. This is betting your entire life and career that the Republican Party in your state is going to continue to be on the ascendancy. This is real intensity.

In Tennessee, the state we're in, two state senators just switched parties, to give Republicans control of the state senate. So these switchers are testifying that Greenberg and the establishment are wrong.

I'd like to go back to 1992 for just a minute, to think about how close things got for us. Bill Clinton got 43 percent of the vote, and he said, "Forty-three percent is fine in a three-way race, but it doesn't do you much good in a two-man race. We must go from 43 percent up to 52 percent. So we are going to have government-run health care, which would nationalize another 10 percent of the economy, lock people into dependency and turn America from a constitutional republic into a European-style social democracy."

A majority of Americans would be dependent on state power, state authority, taxpayer funds, for their livelihoods, for their health, for their safety, and a conservative, anti-government party would never, ever succeed or even survive.

None of the European countries have conservative parties, anti-government parties. The French and even the British and the Swedes discuss how big the welfare state's going to be but nobody stands up and says, "We ought not to have one."

So Clinton was going to change America by putting another 10 percent of us on the dole. This had nothing to do with health care. In the late 1970s, it was the oil crisis that meant you had to nationalize everything. This time it was the health care crisis. And this is how he was going to get to 51 percent of the vote. Because he had a problem.

The problem was, exit polls on the day Clinton was elected showed 55 percent of Americans said they wanted less government, lower taxes, and 36 percent said they wanted more government services and higher taxes. So most Americans wanted less government, by 55 percent to 36 percent.

Bill Clinton's voters also split 55/36, exactly. But just switched, just the opposite. Fifty-five percent of those voting for Clinton wanted bigger government; 36 percent wanted smaller. Bill Clinton's coalition was a photographic negative of the rest of the country. That is why, when he talks to the country, he says one thing but then governs the exact opposite way. It's because his constituency is a photographic negative of the country. This lying to the country and doing the opposite of what he says is not a character flaw; it's a strategy. And it's the only strategy available to someone whose coalition is at war with the rest of the country, at war over resources, values and everything else.

So in 1992, Clinton made this grab to put a majority of Americans on the government dole.

A year ago, almost to this day, I was sitting at a table at a dinner of the American Enterprise Institute. Four very attractive women were at my table and Bob Packwood came over, I presume to talk to me. Anyway, after he had sort of stood there for half an hour, I finally said, "Senator Packwood, I wanted to thank you for your leadership --" in the last month he had helped kill government-run health care -- "for your leadership in helping to kill government-run health care. But I don't understand, why didn't the Clinton people come to you and offer to cut a deal. You know, call it the Packwood Plan, move in your direction, but then eventually get us into a plan that they could expand."

Senator Packwood replied, "I don't understand why they never came to me. I could have brought them seven votes."

So if you ever want to know how close we were to becoming a social democracy in this country, it was Bill and Hillary's unwillingness even to call Bob Packwood. He was willing to bring them seven Republican votes. That would have broken the filibuster and given them government-run health care. Smaller of course, but 80 percent of what they wanted in the first place. That's how close the bullet we dodged came.

Now, we go into 1994, and the following things happen. We pick up 52 seats in the House, eight seats in the Senate, 480 state legislators, and eleven governorships. All across the country. This was a sweep of deep proportions. Before the 1994 election, there were seventeen states completely run by Democrats: governor and both houses of the legislature. And there were three that the Republicans controlled. The Republicans held all of Arizona, Utah and New Jersey.

Today there are fifteen states where the Republicans hold control of both houses and the governorship, and only eight which the Democrats hold. And Republicans hold large states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois. These are large states compared to the ones the Democrats have.

I would argue that the growing Republican coalition can best be understood as a coalition of people who want to be left alone. And that the Democrat coalition at present is best understood as a takings coalition, people who want the government to take something from other people.

These are different coalitions than we've operated with for the last sixty years or so. Franklin Delano Roosevelt built a coalition that encompassed southerners, northern immigrants, labor union members, big city machines and a host of others. Today, that coalition is fractured and shrunk and fallen apart in many ways.

But the "leave us alone" coalition, led by many of the people in this room, I would describe as follows.

They have a central core belief: They want the government to leave them alone. Which is the one thing that the Democratic party is not capable of doing, leaving you alone.

The coalition includes taxpayers, property rights groups, farmers, small businessmen and women. They're not asking for government handouts; they just want to be left alone by the government. It includes home schoolers. They're not asking the government to make other people home school; they just want to be left alone to home school themselves. It includes people who send their kids to private school, and the religious right or the pro-family movement. When you look at the political agenda of these people, it is a parents' rights movement. It is a collection of parents who got active because the government was coming in and throwing condoms at their kids and making fun of their faith and getting between parents and children. If liberals had thought through it, they would have realized how dangerous this would be to the establishment, but they went ahead anyway.

And so this is a coalition that can hold together reasonably well because nobody's in anybody else's pocket.

Let's look at the Democratic coalition, the takings coalition, every part of which is shrinking today. It consists of big labor union leadership, government workers, government contractors and people who are locked into dependency on welfare.

More important for the Democrats, it includes the people who manage that dependency, who keep those people dependent generation after generation, people who make $100,000 a year doing that, not $15,000 a year being dependent. You also have, overlaid on these economic interests, the big city machines, the patronage machines that have held together the Democratic majorities in many of our cities.

And overlaid on that collection of economic self-interest groups are the coercive utopians, the radical utopians, the radical homosexual groups, the radical feminists, the radical environmentalists, the radical animal rightsers, all of whom are at war with the way that most bourgeois Americans see fit to run their lives. These utopians want to use the power of the state to go straighten the rest of us out and get us to do what they want us to do.

I would argue that, while the "leave us alone" coalition is stable and growing, the takings coalition is not stable. And it is shrinking. You can have a meeting of the "leave us alone" coalition -- and we have many of them in Washington -- where in the room are all the parts of the coalition. You have small businessmen, you have small business groups and leaders. And at such a meeting, the gun owners can agree not to throw condoms at the Christians' kids, and the Christians can agree not to steal anybody else's gun. The taxpayers can agree not to regulate anybody else's businesses, and the farmers can agree not to raise anybody else's taxes. Everybody can agree not to mess with anybody else in the room. And then we can go fight the left.

And these are powerful groups. The National Federation of Independent Business has 600,000 members; the Christian Coalition has 1.5 million members, the National Rifle Association has 3 million members now. Each of these groups and dozens more like them in the room just wants to be left alone.

The Democratic coalition is not quite that easy to maintain, because each part of it wants the state to go take things, usually money, from other people and give it to them.

Sometimes they want attention. Like the "Piss Christ." When the guy had his own jar, his own urine and his own crucifix, nobody paid any attention to him at all. But when he got the government to go steal $5,000 from other people and give it to him, then everybody paid attention. And he could pretend that we were all offended by how avant garde he was. But we just wanted our $5,000 back. This was his use of the state to get attention, not so much money. "Hey, look at me," he was saying. "Validate my lifestyle. Aren't I interesting."

But normally the Democratic coalition wants to reach into people's pockets and take their money and bring it back to pay people off.

Once you tell the people in the Democratic takings coalition, "No more money for you," they start looking at each other. It's like a bunch of muggers who are going to go mug somebody but there's nobody out tonight so they start looking at each other. Or wolves that'll start eating each other if there's no prey out there.

The left, in thinking about the Republican coalition, projects onto it their own interests. They think that we want to run other people's lives for them.

It is not the National Rifle Association that insists that kids be taught in school books that are handed out that "Heather has two hunters."

It is not the NRA that wants everybody in high school taught that as a young man Leonardo da Vinci was a well-known gun owner. Look at the Democratic coalition; every piece of it is shrinking. Labor unions -- there are now fewer labor union members than there are self-employed businessmen in this country. Labor union membership is shrinking, and government employment is shrinking as the budget shrinks. When you hear fights about budget numbers, think through the following. Every time you take a billion dollars out of the federal government, stop them from spending a billion, that's 20,000 people not getting $50,000 a year. That's the average pay and compensation package for one government worker: $50,000. It might be somebody getting a grant for $50,000, or whatever. Anyway, one billion dollars less is 20,000 people not getting $50,000 each.

With the Republican budget that Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole and folks are putting together, we are spending $200 billion less in the year 2002 than Clinton would spend. Even under his phony projections. That means that in the Republican future, there will be 4 million people in the private sector who in Bill Clinton's future would have government jobs or be getting government grants. Four million. That is a radical, huge, demographic shift of people who, as the Marxists would say, would be objectively Democrats, with their government jobs, in Bill Clinton's future. Their economic class interests would make them Democrats.

Now, under the Republican budget, they're going to be objectively Republicans or conservatives because they're going to be in the private sector. Four million shift is a huge quantity; it's seven mass immigrations of Cubans coming into the United States to be Republicans all at one and the same time.

Add to that the patronage shift that is taking place across the country. It takes people to run political movements, and the left uses the state to fund its effort. Simple patronage: 52 House members the Democrats lost, every one of them gets 20, maybe 22 staff jobs in Washington. A thousand Democrats lost their jobs as congressional staffers on Capitol Hill when the Democrats lost Congress. Just from the congressmen themselves. When you add in how they're handling the cutbacks in the House and Senate, we're looking at three, maybe four thousand more from committee staffs and from the eight senators who are losing positions. But that's just in Washington, and that's a small piece of the puzzle.

When you go around the country, it's the same thing. In Wyoming, the governor gets 1,000 political appointments; in New Mexico, 1,400 patronage jobs; in New York State -- when I talk to people from New York who run political action committees, PACs, and ask how many patronage jobs the governor has, they just giggle and say, "You mean officially patronage jobs or ones that we really get to control at the end of the day?" Somewhere between 12,000 and 25,000 jobs in New York.

When you add them up, the Democrat party, in November of 1994, lost somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 patronage jobs, full-time patronage jobs. And I would argue that a thousand Democrats losing their jobs in Wyoming is a big switch. Wyoming's not that large a state.

All of these things are adding up.

You can look at the demographics of it. People who became 21 years of age between 1930 and 1950, the years of Democratic predominance, tend towards being Democrats by a ratio of 60-40. Demographically, every year, about two million Americans pass away. At a ratio of 60-40, that's 1.2 million Democrats and 800,000 Republicans. The Democrats are losing 400,000 net voters every year just through attrition.

Because people who came of age in the 1930s tend to be on the left.

These trends adds up. When you look forward two years, four years, five years, you can see a solidly conservative, anti-government future.

It has been estimated that 75 percent of the American left is government-funded, federal, state and local. When you look at who goes to their meetings, when you look at who goes to their conventions, you're talking about government workers, you're talking about labor union leadership, you're talking about coercive union dues, you're talking about the tort lawyers, the trial lawyers, who now match the labor unions in many states as the major funding source for the Democratic party.

 When you have tort reform, step-by-step, a little tort reform here and a little there, in each of the fifty states, every time you do that you puncture a hole in the fundraising efforts of the Democratic Party. Every time you have a new start-up company that's non-union--and jobs are created in new companies--you reduce the flow of cash to the Democratic party.

Now, while I'm projecting a future that's cheerful and where we're doing well, let me make it very clear that we are going to have betrayals, we are going to have setbacks, we are going to have compromises. We have a weak Senate, we don't have every member of the House hard-core. But even with all of those problems, I suggest that we are methodically moving forward and crushing the left.

Even if we get sold out and get the miserable Legal Services Corporation cut 40 percent instead of eliminated, as it should be, this is what it means. It is the equivalent loss to the left as if the Democrats had come and stood in front of the Heritage Building, burned it down, shot everybody inside, walked down the street, done the same thing to the Cato Institute, then gone down to American Enterprise Institute and burned that as well, and done all that three times. That's the loss of resources which results from simply cutting Legal Services Corporation, which funds left-wing lawyers, by 40 percent.

No, we didn't get everything we wanted. I'm very unhappy we didn't kill Legal Services the first day. But if I were on the left watching those resources, in effect, go up in smoke, I would be more distraught.

I suggest that there are four fronts that the Republicans are moving forward on, in going after the left. And these are the same four fronts that also destroyed the Soviet Union.

The first is containment. Ronald Reagan really made containment stick. He said to the Soviet Union, "No more countries. We mean it," as opposed to Jimmy Carter's containment, which was, "No more countries, but we're kidding."

Containment at the federal and state level means no tax increases, guys. No additional resources. When we cut off the resources to government programs, so there are no more increases there, the internal contradictions, both with the Communists and with Washington and the Democratic party, begin to come to the fore. Containment is key.

My group, Americans for Tax Reform, coordinates the taxpayer protection pledge. We have 199 members of the House and 31 members of the Senate who have signed a statement that they'll never raise taxes. Every major candidate for president running as a Republican has taken that pledge, and I believe plans to keep it. So the first front is containment. And it's very important, it's where George Bush really let us down. If he'd held his ground on the tax issue, if he'd kept his pledge, the left would have been significantly weaker. But he allowed them more resources and more funds. There's no such thing as a good tax increase. All taxes are an I.V. stuck into a Republican and drained into a Democrat.

That's what taxes are.

One, containment.

Two, stripping away their sense of moral authority. In the Soviet Union there was a time when they really believed they were doing good things. "Yes, they're killing a lot of people, there's an awful lot of blood on the floor, but at the end of the day we're doing good stuff. This is really impressive; this is going to work." By 1989, they couldn't pull the trigger any more to stop people from leaving. They didn't believe any more that what they were doing was right, moral, good, decent. The accumulated evidence had just piled up and convinced them otherwise.

In the United States, the left used to believe they were helping poor people with welfare. Heck, the right -- the conservatives, Republicans -- used to grant that. "Well, of course you're helping poor people with welfare, and you're trying to help poor people with welfare. But it's expensive, and we wish you'd only help them half as much." Well, that is a losing political stance. "Yes, you're helping people. Stop it." Or, "Do only this much."

But with the failure of the welfare state, we've been able to say to the left, "You are killing people with your welfare state. Every day you destroy neighborhoods, you destroy futures, you destroy people's lives, you break up families. And we are going to stop you from doing bad and evil things to helpless people." Now, that is a different argument we're having. It's a much more radical argument. We're not trying to cut it in half; we're trying to get rid of it. But it's phrased correctly to undercut their sense of moral authority.

Michael Barone, the U.S. News & World Report editor, once said to me, "The reason the left hates Newt Gingrich is he does not cede to them good intentions, and they want to believe that they have good intentions."

A reporter once asked me, "Do you really think the liberals are evil and bad?" And I said, "Okay, if you had a four-year-old who took a cat to the top of a building and threw it off and you said, 'Why did you throw the cat off the building?' and the four-year-old said, 'To see if it would fly,' you would say, 'Cats do not fly. Do not do that again. Okay? They will just fall.'"

"But if you had a 40-year-old who, every day for twenty years, took a cat to the top of a building and threw it off and you said, 'Why are you dropping a cat off the building every day for twenty years,' and he said, 'To see if it will fly,' you might think he doesn't like cats. If you were a cat it wouldn't matter to you whether he thought you might fly or whether he didn't like you."

The point is, that the Democratic party is destroying people and families, and we have to stop them.

We can have a debate about whether they're purposely doing this to poor people because they can't stand them or whether they don't know any better. They keep throwing the cats off, they keep seeing the cats pile up, and they keep trying it again.

But I think it is fair to say that we have turned the corner on the moral authority question. The left -- the left in Washington and in state capitals -- does not believe the welfare state helps people. They are paralyzed into inaction because all of their siblings have jobs in this program or that program, and they can't stop it. But they know it's doing bad things.

That's a tough position you've put the left in. "You're not helping; you're hurting. But you can't stop it because your political clout comes from the people who manage the dependency of others." This is a very important breakthrough.

Third is the sense of inevitability. One was containment, second, the moral high ground, third is the sense of inevitability.

The Soviet Union used to believe they were winning. Scientific socialism. Marx explained it. I remember the first time I read Marx, I said, "Oh, we're cooked! He's just spelled it out. We'll fall apart and everything, and they get to win." A lot of the people on their side believed that it was inevitable that scientific socialism would win. And a lot of people on our side believed it. Whittaker Chambers, when he switched sides, said, "I'm now joining the losing side of history."

It's tough to fight a battle when you really believe that your side is losing, or, as William F. Buckley said, "Conservatives stand athwart history and yell, 'Stop.'"

That's a depressing thought. How do you recruit with that as your message? "Hi, I'm standing here on these train tracks. There's a train coming. It's going to run over me. There's nothing I can do about it, but I'd really appreciate it if you'd stand here with me. We'll both get run over. We don't have a chance. It's not like we have an opportunity to win. We have no chance. We're going to get run over, but it's the virtuous thing to do." I mean, this is a very difficult recruiting device.

I think the left understands now that history has turned against them. They're not going to get new spending programs. They're not going to get more money. When I was in college, it was the liberals who used to chant, "Out, out, out. After the revolution this, after the revolution that." That's not the way they talk any more. Unless they're making reservations for a getaway to Montana or whatever.

Now it is the right that talks about a sense of inevitability, that the government next year will be smaller and the year after that, that programs are disappearing or will become smaller. And I think they are correct. Taking away their sense of inevitability is a terrible blow to the movements of the left. First, the Soviet Union, and now Washington.

And lastly is defunding the left, ending the external sources of financial support for institutions incapable of creating wealth.

 Ronald Reagan made it difficult for the Soviet Union to borrow money and made it difficult for the Soviet Union to import technology, things they could not create on their own. The price of oil and gold dropped. Similarly, we are cutting off the external sources of support of the left when we defund the left.

And, again, when you defund the government, you defund the left. They've been putting it together all these years.

I'm all in favor of going in and getting Legal Services and the National Endowment for the Arts, and all the obvious funding of the left's operations. But we're in a situation where if you just sort of point over this way and pull the trigger, you're not going to hit any of our guys. So we don't have to have real good aim here. Just, "That's the government?" Boom. Okay? Make it smaller. And at the end of the day, we're better off.

Let me close here with a fun story. I was at my college reunion for the school newspaper, a real hard-core, left-wing newspaper when I was in school -- the Harvard Crimson. I ran into a fellow who's now a prominent liberal. He's a liberal writer for major publications. He said, "Grover, you conservatives, you must be so distraught," this was 1992 -- "George Bush has double-crossed you and really undermined the whole effort there." I turned to him and said, "Nick, we're not unhappy. We've spent forty years fighting against the Soviet Empire on one hand and you guys on the other side, a two-front fight against domestic statists and the Soviet Union. You may not have noticed it, but we just crushed the Soviet Union and broke it into fifteen pieces. It's gone. Now we can turn and spend all our time and attention to crushing you.

"And Nick, you don't have nuclear weapons. And while with the Soviet Union it was business, with you it's personal."

Demoralizing the left is fun and profitable and important.

We should remember how our coalition holds together. I like the formulation of the "Leave Us Alone Coalition." It reminds us where any potential rough edges or sharp elbows are, but it also reminds us why we're us.

FDR used to bring in guys from the Ku Klux Klan, northern blacks, immigrants from all over the globe and left-wing intellectuals who'd been here since forever. They'd all sit in a room. And what did they agree on? They agreed they weren't the Republicans. And if you weren't a big, Republican, rich banker, you belonged in that room.

We should constantly remind those in our coalition why we're here and why we aren't them.

There will always be differences. As Speaker Gingrich has pointed out, "In a majority coalition, where we're half of the country -- you've got 260 million people, and more than 130 million of them are us -- you're never going to eliminate conflict. You manage conflict." We're not going to eliminate it.

Minority parties can eliminate conflict. "You don't agree with us? You're out of here." They get the crowd small enough so everybody in the room agrees. But those are the six- and seven-man Trotskyite organizations that float around in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If we're going to have a majority organization, we must understand and manage the conflict that does exist.

Remember how difficult it is to agree on a lot of things. When is the last time you had six people go out for dinner? "Where are we going to go to eat?" How much time and effort is involved in a simple decision like that? If you want 150 million people to agree on where the country ought to go, it's going to be a lot of work. But it's worth the work.

I think as we look ahead we can see a continued growth of the Republican coalition and the shrinking of the Democrat left wing coalition. Every fight is going to get easier because we're going to spend the next two years knee-capping the left. We're going to argue again in 1996, and then we're going to get more Republicans in the House and Senate and go back and chop them down a little bit more. They get smaller after each election, and that makes it easier to win the next fight. 

This address was delivered to the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy in September, 1995 in Nashville, Tennessee.