For years, social con­ser­v­a­tives have sold their mus­cle to eco­nom­ic con­ser­v­a­tives in exchange for lip ser­vice about social issues (see also What’s the Mat­ter with Kansas?). Grover Norquist (famed for his com­ments about bath­tubs and rat­heads in Coke bot­tles) is the dean of the mod­ern small gov­ern­ment fac­tion. He demands that Repub­li­cans he sup­ports sign a pledge nev­er to vote for a tax hike or for new tax­es, and he actu­al­ly beats up on the ones who break the pledge. By build­ing a net­work focussed tight­ly on one issue (tax­es) he’s been able to keep diverse and even oppos­ing inter­ests work­ing togeth­er.
This makes it impor­tant when the Chris­t­ian News Ser­vice declares that Grover Norquist betrayed con­ser­v­a­tives, crit­ics charge. You see, Grover went and did some­thing unfor­give­able. He spoke at a con­fer­ence of the Dal­las Log Cab­in Repub­li­cans. Log Cab­in Repub­li­cans are gay, and that means reli­gious author­i­tar­i­ans don’t like them:

Cathie Adams, pres­i­dent of the con­ser­v­a­tive Texas Eagle Forum, also crit­i­cized the Dal­las Log Cab­in Repub­li­cans and Norquist.

…

Norquist’s pres­ence at the fund-rais­er was “trai­tor­ous,” she added. “If he was a seri­ous eco­nom­ic con­ser­v­a­tive, Grover Norquist would not have accept­ed the invi­ta­tion or the hon­o­rar­i­um for speak­ing at a fund-rais­er for a group bent on the destruc­tion of tra­di­tion­al fam­i­lies,” Adams said.

“It’s deceit­ful to pre­tend to defend sound eco­nom­ic prin­ci­ples while under­min­ing the very fab­ric of soci­ety,” she added.

…

Not­ing that the ATR asks politi­cians to “take the pledge” not to raise tax­es, [Gary] Glenn [pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Fam­i­ly Asso­ci­a­tion] encour­aged “fis­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive [Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform] sup­port­ers who are also social con­ser­v­a­tives to with­hold their future sup­port until Grover ‘takes the pledge’ to no longer give aid and com­fort to homo­sex­u­al activist groups intent on under­min­ing tra­di­tion­al mar­riage and the family.”

Tony Perkins of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil sez:

Grover has spent years work­ing to assem­ble a coali­tion of fis­cal and social con­ser­v­a­tives and his deci­sion to aid those who are try­ing to destroy the insti­tu­tion of mar­riage is tru­ly a dis­ap­point­ment and will no doubt split this impor­tant coali­tion. As social con­ser­v­a­tives we remain com­mit­ted to the coun­try’s fis­cal and social well-being; we have tol­er­ance nei­ther for increas­ing tax­es nor mar­gin­al­iz­ing mar­riage. If only that com­mit­ment were mutual.

If the Freep­ers are to be believed, Norquist is

• gay (“Does he prac­tice homosexuality?”)
• Islamist (“How does this jive with his Islamist sympathies?”)
• mus­lim
• a Jihadist (“This clown is start­ing to look like a stealth Jihadist and Homo­sex­u­al agen­da pusher.”)
• a hyp­ocrite
• “the poster boy for sev­er­al evils”
• “a lady of ill repute”

What this rep­re­sents is the dis­so­lu­tion of the rul­ing coali­tion of the nation. The reli­gious author­i­tar­i­ans are tired of being kicked around. Har­ri­et Miers is the lat­est in a long string of dis­ap­point­ments for them. They expect­ed pow­er now that they con­trol the White House and both leg­isla­tive Hous­es. They want­ed to ban abor­tions and ban­ish gay peo­ple to Mars, or pos­si­bly Cana­da. The small gov­ern­ment con­ser­v­a­tives want­ed to decrease the amount of spend­ing, which also did­n’t happen. 

As the lead­ers in each House aban­don their base and spend more time with crim­i­nal defense lawyers than their con­stituents, the base is get­ting feisty.

One has to won­der if the slow shift of evan­gel­i­cal groups toward envi­ron­men­tal issues is a bar­gain­ing chip. Whether evan­gel­i­cals would aban­don the Repub­li­can par­ty is doubt­ful, but if the orga­ni­za­tions stopped being firm mem­bers of the coali­tion, and were pre­pared to float, maybe endors­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic anti-pover­ty mea­sures, envi­ron­men­tal pol­i­cy, etc., the Repub­li­cans would lose their mus­cle. It would be the equiv­a­lent of unions aban­don­ing the Democrats.

As long as Repub­li­cans were out of pow­er, or dis­tract­ed by a war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, it was pos­si­ble for all the parts of the rul­ing Repub­li­can coali­tion to hang togeth­er. The lib­er­tar­i­ans, small-gov­ern­ment con­ser­v­a­tives, reli­gious zealots, gun nuts, and the oth­er lit­tle fac­tions could all agree that get­ting some­one else elect­ed was the key.

Now, no one seems to be deliv­er­ing. And the base is get­ting rest­less. As always, the prob­lem isn’t rid­ing the tiger, it’s get­ting off that’s hard.