This is part 1 of a 2 part series.
(CONNECTICUT) — We haven’t heard much from Newt Gingrich since Mitt Romney crushed him during the Republican primary. Now that his former foe has been vanquished by the best food stamp president in the history of the United States, as the former speaker of the House might say, Gingrich is once again in the spotlight, this time on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to profess his concern that the Republican Party is in deep trouble. Two Sundays ago, he said:
“If [the Republican presidential nominee’s] competitor in 2016 is going to be Hillary Clinton, supported by Bill Clinton and presumably a still-relatively popular President Barack Obama, trying to win that will be truly the Super Bowl. And the Republican Party today is incapable of competing at that level.”
Newt Gingrich is more irrelevant than even Mitt Romney. It’s unclear why host David Gregory wants his opinion on anything. And that we are talking about the next election a month after the last one ended speaks to the cruel myopia of our political culture.
That said, this is something new.
Gingrich almost brought down the last Democratic president, even as he was cheating on his second wife with his future third and dealing with ethics violations of his own. Yet here he is saying the wife of his former arch enemy scares the pants off Republicans.
And that’s not all! Naughty Newt said nice things about Hillz!
She has a “very formidable” personality, Gingrich said, and she is a “very competent person” who is married to Bill Clinton, “the most popular Democrat in the country.” That her husband wants her to be president makes her “virtually impossible to stop.”
Cognitive dissonance
Democrats love to hate Newt. They love to love Hillary. That the most hated Republican is saying glowing things about the most beloved Democrat inspires cognitive dissonance among Democrats. Everything Newt says is a lie! Except when he said Hillary is unbeatable!
Gingrich is no dummy (though he often plays dumb). He’s listening to the narrative around him and staking out a position from which to exploit it. That narrative goes something like this: Obama won a decisive victory when no Republican thought he stood a chance. If they hope to retake the White House, Republicans must repent their sinful ways before ingratiating themselves to Americans who are not male, Southern, white or rich.
Gingrich echoed that narrative two Sundays ago. The problem wasn’t Mitt Romney and his “47 percent” (“an absurdity,” cried Gingrich); the problem is the Republican Party itself.
“We didn’t blow it because of Mitt Romney. We blew it because of a party which has refused to engage the reality of American life and refused to think through what the average American needs for a better future.”
What he hopes to do, I can’t say. Maybe run for the presidency again. Maybe sell more books. Maybe earn bigger speaking fees. What’s certain is that he’s wrong.
The problem was Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. And that’s not all!
Gingrich sounded like he had nothing to do with either, but he was central to the making of today’s Republican Party and he was pivotal in how Americans came to view Romney.
I’ll talk about how he laid the groundwork for the widely held view that Romney was nothing more than a vulture capitalist, and how Obama parlayed that perception into victory. But first, I’ll talk about how Gingrich perfected a kind of rhetorical strategy that would eventually lead to what libertarian scholar Julian Sanchez called “epistemic closure” — or a conservative media-driven echo chamber intolerant of inconvenient truths.
Bottom line: Democrats could thank Gingrich for a Democratic president’s re-election.
But that kind of cognitive dissonance might blow a Democrat’s head clean off.
The end of America
Gingrich says his party needs to engage the reality of American life, but that’s hard to do when Gingrich invented an alternative reality in which every Democrat, no matter how centrist or even conservative, is radical, corrupt, intolerant and sick, or is a communist, degenerate, spendthrift traitor (these and others come from Mother Jones’ helpful and instructive “Newt in His Own Words: 33 Years of Bomb-Throwing“).
Gingrich came to the Capitol in 1978. Since then, he has rarely turned down, in and out of office, a chance to tie his enemies or their ideas to Hitler, fascism, genocide or totalitarianism. Over the years, the song has remained remarkably the same. His litany of otherization has grown to include gays, Islamists, Maoists, atheists and (my favorite) Kenyan anti-colonialists. His art is fear-mongering, and Gingrich is a master.
In 1983, he said: If we follow the “liberal Democratic line, we would truly have tyranny everywhere, and we in America could experience the joys of Soviet-style brutality and murdering of women and children.” In 1984: “It used to be called socialism. It is now just sort of liberal Democratic platform pledges.” In 1989: “The left-wing Democrats will represent the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, [and] total bizarreness.”
The prevailing liberal view is that racism is the reason the Republican Party has treated the first African-American president with so much disrespect. But Obama’s race isn’t a cause. It’s just another target of demonization, a cast of mind that began with Gingrich before he was elected to the House. He told a group of College Republicans in 1978:
“The great strength of the Democratic Party in my lifetime has been that it has always produced young, nasty people who had no respect for their elders. Jimmy Carter, who, at 51 thought that Hubert Humphrey at 66 was over the hill. Jody Powell and Hamilton Jordan, who at 29 and 30 thought they could beat the pros. And I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.”
So he taught a generation of Republicans how to be nasty. And he continues teaching.
After Obama’s first election, the Great Teacher said: “There is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will.” In 2010, he said the “secular-socialist machine … represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.” That same year, he said Obama “would mean the end of America as it has been for the last 400 years.”
‘It is a war for power’
And the litany goes on and on and on.
Put it together and you have rhetorical strategy that makes no attempt to “engage the reality of American life” and the needs of the citizenry. It has the political effect of negative space. There is no there, there. Yet it governs the shape of everything around it.
Newtism, (not) to coin a phrase, isn’t interested in problem-solving, bipartisanship, power-sharing, compromise or collaboration. It’s mode is attack — to discredit, disable or destroy the enemy through obfuscation, equivocation and prevarication.
We often use the term “Southern Strategy” to mean race-baiting. But southern plantation owners threatened to secede if Yankee abolitionists passed any law threatening slavery. Newtism does the same. If it doesn’t get what it wants, boom. It blows up the place.
In that 1978 speech to the College Republicans, he said politics isn’t about governing and compromise. “You’re fighting a war,” Gingrich said. “It is a war for power.”
The essence of Newtism
If there is one example that distills Newtism to its essence, it might be his comment on Dinesh D’Souza’s 2010 article in Forbes titled “How Obama Thinks” (it was adapted into a film prior to the election). This article has become required reading among students of intellectual dishonesty. It argues that Obama is trying to realize the dreams of his dead dad by creating an anti-business Leninist-Marxist state in the U.S. Gingrich said:
“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.
“This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president. … I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true … he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve … He was authentically dishonest.”
Get it?
It doesn’t matter what the president is actually doing. It doesn’t matter what the facts of his life are. What matters is that he is the son of a foreigner who embraced alien ideas from his African homeland, and that Obama pretended to be authentically American even as he strove to manifest a utopian nightmare that would destroy America as we know it.
In brief, Barack Obama is not one of us. Worse, he pretends to be. That he is president says more about his powers of deception than it does about the will of the people.
The danger of ‘epistemic closure’
Does Gingrich believe what he is saying? I doubt it. But I can’t say the same for his pupils, including the tea party “insurgents” of 2010 and the 2012 Republican nominee.
Romney appears to have believed that half the country is mooching off the other half. Along with the entire Republican establishment, he believed voters supported Obama in 2008 because he is black (to make up for slavery or something). And because he had no chance with 47 percent of the electorate, he believed his best chance of winning was to drive to the polls voters worried that Obama was in cahoots with gay fascists to turn America into a Leninist-Marxist-atheist-Islamist state that enjoys murdering women and children.
This is Gingrich’s whirlwind. But he didn’t reap it. Romney did.
Gingrich spent 30 years building an intellectual foundation for cutting taxes, cutting spending and cutting government. But there was no foundation. It didn’t know what it wanted. It only knew what it didn’t. This is a politics of absence. There is no there, there.
Yet, as I said, it governs the shape of everything around it, including Romney’s campaign. His entire strategy was based on creating a picture of the president recognizable only to other Republicans already tapped into the conservative media-driven echo chamber.
And because Romney only believed polling that came from that same echo chamber, he didn’t believe he had lost the race until late into the evening on Election Day when it dawned on him that the boogie man he’d created had just blown up in his face.
This was more than epistemic closure. It was an epistemic explosion.
And, in a way, Democrats have Newt Gingrich to thank.
Next: How Gingrich The Class Warrior Inspired Obama’s Populism.