Grover Norquist is a formidable political strategist in part because he listens closely to smart people like Arthur C. Brooks. That’s one of many reasons why Norquist’s new book, “Leave Us Alone: Getting government’s hands off our money, our guns, our lives,” could be the most prescient political work of 2008.
Brooks, of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, did a statistical analysis last year comparing fertility rates of 100 randomly selected self-described liberals and 100 conservatives from the 1974 cohort of the General Social Survey.
Brooks found that in 1974 the liberal group had 188 children, compared to 231 kids for the conservatives. In 2004, the liberal group would have 147 children, compared to 208 for the conservatives. The fertility difference decade-to-decade between liberals and conservatives profoundly favors the latter.
As Norquist notes: “The decline in the overall fertility rates that have been well-reported by the establishment press obscures the question of ‘whose’ fertility. The fertility gap to the advantage of future conservatives over future liberals rose from 22.9 percent in 1974 to 41.5 percent in 2004, an increase of 0.6 percent each year.”
In a characteristically biting Norquistian observation, he adds “there is a strong likelihood that more fecund conservatives will breed more conservatives than their reproductively challenged liberal brethren, who evidently watch ‘Sex and the City’ in lieu of raising rugrats.”
Numbers like those have inescapable consequences for election outcomes. Norquist points out that the fertility gap will tend to favor the GOP for at least the next 25 years and the trend may even accelerate. Even now, population growth in Republican counties in the 17 states designated as “battleground” states by the Democratic Leadership Council outpaces the Democratic counties, most heavily in the larger counties.
But it’s not simply demographics that favor the right. The factor that correlates most strongly with red-state status is “being married,” according to another statistical study cited by Norquist. Red states are having more kids and people in red states tend to be married longer, a fact that helps explain why President Bush carried all 25 states ranked by years married for white women and 22 of the 25 when ranked by years married for all races.
It’s not just liberal fertility rates going against the trend here. Norquist contends that what liberals pass off as environmentalism and its incessant demands for Smart Growth policies to limit suburbanization often “sound very much like the East German border guard who missed.”
Fortunately for the right, much of the left’s political energies are routinely expended on behalf of policies meant to increase housing and other costs in suburbs surrounding blue big cities, preventing new roads from being built that would otherwise strengthen suburban economies and shifting gas-tax and other transportation dollars to mass transit that works only for people moving around within those blue cities.
Norquist devotes several additional chapters to similar trends that favor conservative ascendancy, including the proliferation of individual retirement accounts, 401(K)s and other defined-contribution retirement plans that give individuals control of their financial destiny, the growing number of states with “conceal and carry” gun laws that provide a powerful incentive against violent crime and the success of the home schooling movement in highlighting the bankruptcy of the teachers unions that refuse to allow genuine reform in public schools.
If Norquist is right, the 2006 and 2008 elections look increasingly like deviations from the norm, which means conservative despondency about November is ill-matched with political reality. But the right’s future prospects are by no means assured, if only because elections are never decided until Election Day.
The GOP base is the “Leave Us Alone” coalition of the book’s title, the coalition of small and home-based business people, home schoolers and other advocates for greater choice in education, young people who know Social Security won’t “be there” when their time comes to receive benefits, low-tax activists, private property owners who fear confiscation by eminent domain or other government legerdemains, gun owners and communities of faith from a wide swath of denominational description.
These folks just want to be left alone to live their lives in freedom without fear of government diktat. If the GOP establishment wants to keep its base, reading “Leave Us Alone” is an essential first step.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog.
