Grover Norquist: 'Field Marshal' of the Bush Plan

Norquist has been working on a long range plan to destroy liberal democracy for years.

Easy to forget in the bustle of day-to-day battles is the fact that Norquist prides himself on thinking big. "That," he says, "is one of the reasons Newt and I got along so well." During one conversation, in a crowded hallway at February's Conservative Political Action Conference, Norquist reaches into his jacket pocket and extracts a sketched-out timeline starting in 1980 and going to 2040. On it, neatly arrayed in rows, are a dozen or fifteen projects of Norquist's "center-right coalition," some nearly completed, others not even to begin for a decade or more. Some, like privatization of Social Security, will take twenty years, he believes. Others, such as the elimination of racial preferences, abolition of affirmative action and even the elimination of racial and ethnic categories in future censuses--a package he lumps together as "the creation of a color-blind society"--may take longer than that. And some projects seem almost quaint, such as his quirky effort to name things, almost anything, after Ronald Reagan.

Still others can be won piecemeal, and right away. Asked to name one that might emerge as his next battleground, he pauses. Well, he says, there's the matter of all those state and local pension plans. State by state, he's planning to launch a campaign to dismantle and privatize state pension plans and their trillions of dollars of public funds held as investments for retirees. "Just 115 people control $1 trillion in these funds," he says. "We want to take that power and destroy it." From the Nation - May 14, 2001 issue

Schwarzenegger also proposed what's sure to be a hotly-contested plan to overhaul the CalPERS public employees pension program. He said he wants to do away with pensions and move to a system in which employees would fund their own retirement. January 5, 2005