Know Your Norquist

All those Greenies and Naderites who grumble about the permanent duopoly on political power in Washington, D.C., can take heart: It's over, according to an emerging consensus. The bad news: It's been replaced by a near-permanent monopoly. Of Republicans.

At least, that's the bad news for liberals if the new presumption of perpetual Republican dominance in Washington turns out to be correct. Although it's only a theory, it's one with a surprising number of adherents. Even parts of the left have begun to embrace it. But the idea's leading proponent is, unsurprisingly, a conservative: Grover Norquist, the longtime Rasputin of the right. "The Republicans are looking at decades of dominance in the House and Senate, and having the presidency with some regularity," Norquist told the New York Times last week. A few days earlier, he made the same point, with slightly less confidence, to CNBC Washington bureau chief and Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray: "For the next 10 years in the House and Senate, we're looking at Republican control." In the Washington Post last month, Norquist wrote of a "guarantee of united Republican government" that "has allowed the Bush administration to work and think long-term."

The GOP's Prophet of Permanence

Norquist sees every election as world-historical. "The 2000 elections will decide the Democrats' future," he wrote in 1999. A year earlier, he fretted that if President Clinton "retakes the House for liberalism, his place in history will be on a par with that of FDR or JFK." Norquist has counterfactual nightmares along the same lines. He told Reason in 1997: "I mean, four more years of Carter, and Central America would have been communist, and South America would have been communist, and they would have rolled up Africa, they would have rolled up Latin America. We could have lost the whole shooting match to what we now know as a rather pathetic Soviet empire. But they still could have beaten us if Carter had continued supervising our team." He also confessed that he feared that Clinton's effort to implement universal health care could have relegated the Republicans to permanent minority status: "Had the Democrats taken over health care, I think we would have become a social democracy and we could have never undone it. We wouldn't have won in '94, and even if we did, it wouldn't matter because 50 percent of the population would be on the take."

The Republicans are in power forever?-until the next election, when the Democrats could be in power forever. Norquist lives on the brink. His fear of what the terrifying power of the state would be like under complete Democratic control explains his willingness to make a rare departure from the GOP line to oppose the Patriot Act. As the prophet of Republican permanence told Salon: "Someday Hillary Clinton's going to be attorney general, and I hope conservatives keep that in mind."