Grover Norquist on Tea Party Conservatism

I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress when I was a kid and I loved it but I thought it was science fiction. I did not realise there were political implications. What are those, why is it here?

Heinlein does two kinds of books. One is political and the other is weird sex. I thought he was a political activist because I was introduced to him through The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It compares the flawed statist world to the freedom of the anarchist, utopian moon. So it has both utopia and dystopia available to you. It puts it into the distant future and it suggests progress and people gravitating towards liberty. There’s more liberty in the future – as opposed to the Marxist idea that we’re all inevitably moving to statism. I have read his other book, where everyone has to be a soldier to vote and they fight the bugs, Starship Troopers. That one is also political. It doesn’t have the line in it, but Heinlein is famous for the quote, ‘An armed society is a polite society’– you know, people don’t spit at other people.

And I suppose in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, if you’re not polite, you get thrown out into the vacuum.

Yes. It’s obviously a radical vision, but it has the theme that in a free society, volunteerism works. Remember, there are two kinds of science fiction. There’s the one that Asimov and Heinlein do, that is high-tech and in the future science fiction/the science of the future will make you more free. Then there is the other vision that is Brave New World, science in the service of the state, that it will make you a slave. So this is a counter to the idea that science in the hands of the state will lead to serfdom. Science in the hands of individuals will lead to freedom. I like this book because it does both – here’s the future that doesn’t work, the earth, here’s the future that does work, the moon. Similar to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, but it’s a different venue and therefore you don’t have to read turgid tracts…

What if someone says it’s not a conservative book, it’s an anarchist’s book? It’s revolution and not really a conservative vision of things.

It’s conservative in that the revolution on the moon takes place on 4 July 2076. I think there are many doors into modern Reagan Republican conservatism and this is a sort of a radical utopia, Atlas Shrugged kind of future. There are these people who argued, ‘Oh yeah, well, in the old days life was simpler, but now that life is more complicated the government has to run it all.’ Farmers could be free but not people who work in factories. I always thought it was a BS argument, but you heard it all the time, I remember hearing this from schoolteachers. So here was a future that was a utopian, free future, an optimistic future. I remember the Libertarian Party convention in 1980 wanted to have a science-fiction award for the person who uses science fiction to promote liberty most effectively. And there was this counter from the [Murray] Rothbard libertarian types who argued that bug-eaters have rights too. That we shouldn’t project the future as a high-tech future because some people may choose to live in caves. And I thought to myself, ‘For crying out loud! Yes of course people can live in caves if they want but that is probably not the future that most people would choose for themselves if there are other options.’

Let’s move on to the next two books. They surprise me actually because I think of you as primarily focused on economic issues, rather than Cold War kinds of issues and both of these books are very much Cold War period books. Let’s talk about Witness first because it’s the more famous of the two. Why Whittaker Chambers?

I read both of them in the same summer at my public library, in Weston Public Library.

How old were you?

Twelve, 13.

Where’s Weston?

Weston is 12 miles due west of Boston.

So you’re in the library…

Yes. So they were selling them off for a nickel or quarter a piece because the library was getting rid of all its silly right-wing books that nobody wanted. So I picked up all my anti-Communist stuff for a buck. I also got Masters of Deceit and the other J Edgar Hoover books and so on. I was an anti-Communist first, and a broader conservative/free marketeer later. I knew the other team for the bad guys, but I remember, as a teenager, not being completely opposed to certain government regulations. I hadn’t thought about it particularly, but then later I became more free market in my thinking. There was also the Vietnam War, which was a big thing. The Communists were pushing us, and the hard left was opposed to our opposing them, not as libertarians saying, ‘Excuse me but what are we doing in their war?’ but as, ‘They are the good guys, why are we fighting against the good guys?’

Are Chambers and your next book, Philbrick’s I Led Three Lives, relevant to conservatism today?

Yes, in the following sense. Philbrick used to hold cell meetings in my hometown, in Weston, Massachusetts, so that made it more interesting. I lived on Red Hill in Weston.