The Many Faces of Newt Gingrich

A House speaker divided

John J. Pitney, Jr. from the February 1997 issue

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In a 1989 interview with Ripon Forum, Gingrich suggested the answer: "There is almost a new synthesis evolving with the classic moderate wing of the party where, as a former Rockefeller state chairman, I've spent most of my life, and the conservative/activist right wing." In important ways, the Gingrich Republicanism of the 1990s echoes the liberal Republicanism of the 1960s.

Those Republicans stood out by their commitment to civil rights, a position that appealed to Gingrich. Even as an undergraduate political activist at Emory University, he denounced the racism of Georgia Democrats and urged Republicans to court black voters. In 1979, his first entry in the Congressional Record marked Martin Luther King's birthday. During the 1980s, Gingrich supported sanctions against South Africa's apartheid regime.

Civil rights leaders may attack Gingrich's stands, but one can still detect signs of his 1960s liberalism. In his inaugural address, he said, "The greatest leaders in fighting for an integrated America in the 20th century were in the Democratic Party." In the 104th Congress, he squelched a full-scale assault on affirmative action, arguing that the GOP should spend "four times as much effort reaching out to the black community to ensure that they know they will not be discriminated against, as compared to the amount of effort we've put into saying we're against quotas and set- asides."

In the 1960s and '70s, liberal Republicans stood in the vanguard of the environmental movement. (Rockefeller's interest was proprietary, since his family owned much of the planet.) Gingrich has carried this tradition to Congress, trying to soften the party's "anti-green" image. His November speech to the House Republicans nicely captured his attitude: "As Americans we should not accept a tradeoff which says you're either for bureaucrats bullying citizens or you're for killing off endangered species. We are for endangered species being saved, and we're for American liberties being saved. We're for the right technologies for the environment and the right opportunities for the economy. And yes, that takes creativity, but that's why we were elected: to be creative, not just coercive. And we're going to solve both."

This tack is reminiscent of the liberal Republicans' public policy approach, which faulted the Great Society less for its lofty aims than for its unresponsive bureaucracies. In his doctoral dissertation, Gingrich was already thinking that way. "Belgian colonialism was in fact a model of technocratic government," he said, concluding that "the dream of technocratic planning had all too many hidden limitations and so became a nightmare." Substitute "Washington bureaucracy" for "Belgian colonialism," and you have the makings of a Gingrich floor speech.

During the 1960s, Ripon Republicans advocated early versions of proposals such as enterprise zones, which they said would lead to an "opportunity state." In the 1980s, Gingrich changed the term to "opportunity society" and used it to sum up his guiding notions: devolving power and programs to states and localities; privatizing government functions wherever possible; replacing red tape with economic incentives; and reforming government to make it more accessible.

If this description sounds like Clintonism, don't be surprised. Clinton, after all, has cribbed much of his rhetoric from Gingrich. (See "The Adventures of 'But-Man,'" November 1996.) As Gingrich adopts a more cooperative attitude toward the administration, expect to see agreements on modest steps to improve federal performance. In the spirit of the Reinventing Government initiative, Gingrich told the House GOP, "I believe we can overhaul the mid-level bureaucracy of the Pentagon and that our goal should be to turn the Pentagon into a triangle by reducing at least 40 percent of the unnecessary duplication and waste that's in the system." (Here he was going outside the "nine dots" of traditional geometry.)

Gingrich's principles will run into problems. Cutting elements of the Pentagon budget might make sense, but there will be tradeoffs in the military's capabilities. More broadly, the GOP agenda is not entirely consistent. Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) admitted to reporter Elizabeth Drew that Republicans "have some conflicting interests, and we want block granting and freedom for local and state governments when it fits our agenda, and we want restrictions when that fits our agenda."

The Futurist

Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be,
I project the history of the future.

Gingrich is both historian and futurist. In high school, he read Toynbee's A Study of History as well as the Foundation trilogy, in which Isaac Asimov recast the Roman Empire as a space- based civilization. As a House member, Gingrich made the trilogy required reading for his aides. As he explained to aide Frank Gregorsky, "[W]hat I'm trying to convey to you is that I'm a figure who thinks in terms of 100-year increments, and I think in terms of civilization's rising and falling over 500-year increments."

Asimov's main character, Hari Seldon, is a "psychohistorian" who forecasts his civilization's decline and devises a way to hasten its renewal. Gingrich summed up the underlying concepts: "The premise was that, while you cannot predict individual behavior, you can develop a pretty accurate sense of mass behavior...[Yet] Asimov did not believe in a mechanistic world. Instead, to Asimov, human beings always hold their fate in their own hands."

Another important influence on Gingrich has been the work of Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980). Just as the world shifted from agricultural civilization ("The First Wave") to industrial civilization ("The Second Wave"), says Toffler, now it is shifting to a civilization based on knowledge and information ("The Third Wave"). According to Gingrich, "the information age means more decentralization, more market orientation, more freedom for individuals, more opportunity for choice, more capacity to be productive without controls by the state." One passage in Future Shock helps explain futurism's political value: "As we move from poverty toward affluence, politics changes from what mathematicians call a zero-sum game to a non-zero sum game....A system for generating imaginative policy ideas could help us take maximum advantage of the non-zero opportunities ahead." Technology will not just settle problems, it will transcend them--a painless solution to the nine-dot dilemmas of public policy.

Applying this idea to health care, Gingrich told his colleagues in November that "we represent better care with better science through better participation, so you have a better quality of life at lower cost. And frankly, I think we as a party can do an immense amount...at dramatically expanding the opportunities for the American people, and in the process, both improving the quality of life and lowering the cost to the taxpayers." In the 105th Congress, look for GOP initiatives on medical research and "wellness" programs.

This example, however, highlights a problem with the futurist approach. According to Charles Krauthammer, a centrist commentator with an M.D., Gingrich's optimism about costs is "nonsense on stilts." High-tech medicine extends lifespans, thereby increasing the ranks of the elderly, who need costlier treatments. In this case as in others, futurism downplays tradeoffs.