Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read. When I ask him how he views his legacy, Gingrich takes me on a tour of a Western world gripped by crisis. In Washington, chaos reigns as institutional authority crumbles.
Throughout America, right-wing Trumpites and left-wing resisters are treating midterm races like calamitous fronts in a civil war that must be won at all costs. And in Europe, populist revolts are wreaking havoc in capitals across the Continent. Twenty-five years after engineering the Republican Revolution, Gingrich can draw a direct line from his work in Congress to the upheaval now taking place around the globe. But as he surveys the wreckage of the modern political landscape, he is not regretful.
It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution. The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids.
But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. But Gingrich had a plan.
The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras.
Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership. They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs. Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators.
Bob Livingston , a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers.
For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C- span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.
Although Congress had been a volatile place during periods of American history—with fistfights and canings and representatives bellowing violent threats at one another—by the middle of the 20th century, lawmakers had largely coalesced around a stabilizing set of norms and traditions.
Entrenched committee chairs may have dabbled in petty corruption, and Democratic leaders may have pushed around the Republican minority when they were in a pinch, but as a rule, comity reigned. This ethos was perhaps best embodied by Republican Minority Leader Bob Michel, an amiable World War II veteran known around Washington for his aversion to swearing— doggone it and by Jiminy were fixtures of his vocabulary—as well as his penchant for carpooling and golfing with Democratic colleagues.
Michel was no liberal, but he believed that the best way to serve conservatism, and his country, was by working honestly with Democratic leaders—pulling legislation inch by inch to the right when he could, and protecting the good faith that made aisle-crossing possible.
More important, Gingrich intuited that the old dynamics that had produced public servants like Michel were crumbling. Tectonic shifts in American politics—particularly around issues of race and civil rights—had triggered an ideological sorting between the two parties.
Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats two groups that had been well represented in Congress were beginning to vanish, and with them, the cross-party partnerships that had fostered cooperation. Rather than letting the party bosses in Washington decide which candidates deserved institutional support, he took control of a group called gopac and used it to recruit and train an army of mini-Newts to run for office. Gingrich hustled to keep his cause—and himself—in the press. Effective as these tactics were in the short term, they had a corrosive effect on the way Congress operated.
But Gingrich looks back with pride on the transformations he set in motion. And no one was noisier than Newt. It was , and he was 15 years old. His family was visiting Verdun, a small city in northeastern France where , people had been killed during World War I.
The battlefield was still scarred by cannon fire, and young Newt spent the day wandering around, taking in the details. He found a rusted helmet on the ground, saw the ossuary where the bones of dead soldiers were piled high.
His mother struggled with manic depression , and spent much of her adult life in a fog of medication. Gingrich moved around a lot and had few friends his age; he spent more time alone in his room reading books about dinosaurs than he did playing with the neighborhood kids. But this is not the stuff Gingrich likes to talk about. Those family picnics at the zoo that he has been reminiscing about all day? It was in Verdun that Gingrich found an identity, a sense of purpose.
The next year, Gingrich turned in a page term paper about the balance of global power, and announced to his teacher that his family was moving to Georgia, where he planned to start a Republican Party in the then—heavily Democratic state and get himself elected to Congress. Gingrich immersed himself in war histories and dystopian fiction and books about techno-futurism—and as the years went on, he became fixated on the idea that he was a world-historic hero.
As Gingrich tells me about his epiphany in Verdun, a man in a baseball cap approaches us in full fanboy mode. I love you on Fox. After the superfan leaves, I make a passing observation about how many admirers Gingrich has at the zoo. This is the same broad principle that Naomi Klein describes on a worldwide scale in The Shock Doctrine , but with less of a lightening-strike approach. Three claims. Three whoppers. All puffery. As a second-term GOP House member in , Newt had nothing to do with supply-side economics, other than voting for the Kemp-Roth tax cuts.
The threat of communism was already gone. Balanced budgets are merely a means to an end: the destruction of the welfare state.
And the proof of this is quite simple: Within a year of Clinton leaving office, with the GOP controlling Congress and the White House, the surplus was gone as well. What they had to do to take over the institution was to blow it up.
And he proceeded to do just that. Gingrich did this by changing campaign strategy and tactics to a standardised practice of demonisation, which he spread throughout the Republican Party to anyone who would listen, Nadler explained. Now how did he know that the Democratic candidate for dog-catcher in Oshkosh was corrupt?
The list of words to describe Democrats should be familiar to anyone who listens to Newt. Just look at this list:. And what about Republicans? Of course, politicians have used language manipulatively since the dawn of time. When Newt promoted the idea that every last Democratic officeholder down to the dog-catcher in Oshkosh was corrupt, he was not promoting lying, but bullshit, as explained by philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his best-selling book On Bullshit.
Frankfurt defined bullshit as being unconcerned with the truth or falsehood, while aiming to impress and persuade. Again, this is nothing new to politicians. What Newt introduced and promoted was simply a profound intensification of the dark, divisive side of politics. Newt was dramatically less successful when it came to his next stage of propagandising: his creation of a college course to spread the conservative gospel via closed-circuit connections to scores of sites across the country.
He did manage to pull it off — at the same time that he became Speaker, no less. But the final report contains some devastating material, and the course transcripts are a treasure trove just waiting to be rediscovered. However it also notes how both men had actually been quite critical of it.
We experienced this recently when former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that he would vote for Biden. Biden, Jr. That entire conversation rests on a myth that the renegades have taken over the GOP. The truth is they did so decades ago. Until analysts reckon with the fact that there is no old-school Republican establishment anymore, we will never understand what the GOP has become to its core.
Donald Trump is not an outlier. He is a perfect fit for the modern Republican Party. With his victory, the conservative revolution reached its greatest moment of triumph, finally gaining hold of the levers of power. But continued Democratic control of the House of Representatives, which had been the status quo since , proved a massive obstacle to achieving their goals. Elected in , Gingrich arrived in Washington eager to shake things up. He argued that if the GOP ever wanted to defeat the Democrats, they needed to embrace a smashmouth style of partisanship which revolved around character assassination, violating norms and tearing down governing institutions.
Thirsty for power, party leaders took the deal. The gatekeepers invited the bomb-throwers into the temple in with Camscam, the stunt where congressional Republicans stood in front of the C-SPAN cameras and accused Democrats of being weak on defense. House rules stipulated that the camera could only show the person speaking.
Robert Michel, known as an old-guard Republican who practiced civility and bipartisanship, authorized Gingrich and his allies to make these speeches as he realized it would wound the reputation of Democrats. The corrupt Democratic majority became a central theme for all Republicans.
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