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#477 – Dick Bernard: Grover Norquist

Tonights edition of 60 Minutes on CBS had a segment about anti-tax guru Grover Norquist. The segment is accessible here. It is well worth watching.
Norquist is an immensely powerful non-elected actor in national tax policy. He claims to represent the consensus of anti-tax Americans, and his record shows in the the composition of the current Congress.
He is not invincible. A few months ago he was challenged on the true membership numbers of his organization. (The members of his group are undisclosed). He felt a need one evening last spring to claim that he had 100,000 members around the United States – a likely highly inflated claim. I watched him make the claim in an on-air interview.
In a population of over 300,000,000, his claimed membership figure (100,000) translates into one member per 3,000 population, and most likely most of these ‘members’ are highly funded organizations not required to reveal their participation. Nonetheless, they exercise an immense amount of undeserved power, and are not invincible.
Grover Norquist and his organization are, in my opinion, demonstrating the universal paradox of reaching a pinnacle of Power: the more Powerful they appear to be, the more Vulnerable (and thus powerless) they truly are. They know this, but at the end they fight mightily to not show this vulnerability.
Norquist just turned 55 years of age; at his end, an aged appearing Hitler had just turned 56. Napoleon Bonaparte died at 52. Ridiculous comparisons? Perhaps.
But think a bit more about this. Norquist in a sense earned his power. He is in no control of his fate.
There are numerous internet sources about Norquist and his organization.
It is worth taking the time to learn something about him and his history.
He’s “king on a hill”, and he has nowhere to go but down….
But we can’t cower in a corner to push he and his powerful allies off the pinnacle. That takes hard and individual work.
Related here and here.