In today’s Post, I review Grover Norquist’s new book, Leave Us Alone:

[Norquist’s] book manages to diagnose and prescribe treatment for the ills of the modern-day Republican Party with hardly a mention of the tumor in its guts: Bush-Rove-style Big Government Conservatism.

Norquist breaks down modern political actors into two camps: the Leave Us Alone Coalition and the Takings Coalition. The Leave Us Alone Coalition, he says, consists of taxpayers (the ones who want lower taxes, anyway) businessmen, property owners, gun owners, homeschoolers and conservative religious types threatened by the secular mainstream - Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Mormons. The Takings Coalition consists of government workers, labor unions, trial lawyers, welfare recipients and much of academia - or, as Norquist puts it, folks who “raise your taxes to subsidize Piss Christ while explaining that your church cannot be used for child care until you cover up all those icky crucifixes.”

But has the Republican Party of the last 10 years really been under the sway of a Leave Me Alone Coalition? Far from it. That’s the sort of coalition libertarian Republicans wish they had, but it’s certainly not what’s existed in practice.

It would be nice if the GOP’s problems were as minor and self-correcting as Norquist argues — requiring, mainly, that Red Staters breed and New Deal liberals die (in the natural course of getting old, of course, nothing more drastic). They are, however, not.