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Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America
Posted: 2/14/05A review of Newt Gingrich’s Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America By Bob Bauer Newt Gingrich is a former, possibly even a future, politician who also possesses academic credentials and intellectual aspirations which he seeks to keep burnished and well-advertised. Gingrich presents himself as an independent thinker as well as a party publicist and promoter; he is both philosophe and tactician. In this most recent book, he advises readers early that he has engaged in a "lifelong study of history," including earning a Ph.D. in the field (pp. xi-xii), and that in recent years, he added to his portfolio "an in-depth study of national security, health, science and technology, and the American economy." (p. xii.) This is a rousing announcement: the reader is prepared to settle into a voyage of intellectual discovery, its destination being no less rewarding than our learning how to "win the future." So it is discomfiting to find that the book opens with a "test" readers are invited to take, one that purports to explore the "great and growing gap between traditional American values and the secular liberalism of the Left." (pp. ix-x.) The questions are hardly subtle in concept or formulation. One example: are you "proud to be an American?" For each of the questions, a percentage is inserted into parentheses to indicate "recent poll numbers that reflect public opinion on the issue." Someone taking the test is in this way invited to consider whether her answers, such as to the question about belief in God, puts her at odds with her fellow citizens. And if they do, with the result that she scores below 51 points, she is advised to stop reading the book. A voyage of intellectual discovery like this is hardly undertaken in a generous spirit of inquiry if a large number of those applying for passage are invited to jump overboard. But this is vintage Gingrich: his lectures have always been delivered with something of a snarl. Acceptance of his premises—precisely as he chooses to state them—is a condition of acceptance into the course. This intolerance is part of his make-up, and it was a distinguishing feature of his politics. In the world that he subjects to "in-depth" study, there are those, like himself, who understand American values and are entitled to consideration as good Americans, and then there are those on "the Left." These last are found, he notes repeatedly in this book, in the academy, the press, the courts and the federal government "bureaucracy," and their thought is socialist, unpatriotic, sclerotic, backward, and surpassingly elitist. Gingrich, utterly lacking in a sense of irony, then announces, for good measure, that "The Left has a simple, Manichean view of the world." (p. 27.) As children like to say: takes one to know one. This obsession with the evil-doing of secular liberal elites produces, in Gingrich the historian, some confusing historical thinking. In his acknowledgement, he expresses the hope that his grandchildren will inherit "an America that is as free, safe, healthy and prosperous as the America we inherited." The "we" includes him; and since he was born in 1943, his America was that of Franklin Roosevelt and the cadre of experts that FDR recruited to remake the country with "big government" New Deal policies. So why all the bitter scorn heaped on "Democrats" and the "Left," who evidently did their part to achieve an American that is "free, safe, healthy and prosperous"? Gingrich appears willing somehow to give Roosevelt a pass (p. 41), but not the "liberal minority" of the ‘60s and "since," who "intimidated, manipulated, and bullied" the conservative majority. (p. xiv.) Somehow all this bullying was managed over a period that include Republican victories in five of the last seven Presidential elections and their acquisition of control of both the House and Senate. Gingrich’s way of thinking, his very capacity for analytic thought, seems clouded by a an amalgam of fears and resentments. He is really a soldier in the culture wars: this is the duty he is comfortable with, and for which he repeatedly re-enlists. It accounts for one of the quirkier aspects of his thought, also on offer in this book: his belief that America is fighting to defend its "civilization" and that he is the knight principally responsible for the defense. When President Clinton was first elected in l992, Gingrich famously conducted a seminar, complete with flipcharts, to explain his role in the unfolding Crusade:
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (2004) at 106. This is a demanding mission—advocating, defining, teaching and arousing—and with none other than civilization in the balance. In this new book, Gingrich is more subdued about his own role in the defense of civilization, but no less firm on the continuing threat and the need for that defense: "American needs to renew its civilization" (p. xiii). Beyond these grand, and grandiose, themes, flaring forth from is resentments and martial sense of mission, Gingrich sets out in the book a host of what he views as bold or imaginative proposals to address economic, security and social challenges to the country. Few are developed at length: most are introduced, in a line or two, apparently more to suggest that Gingrich’s mind is fertile with these suggestions than to examine them in detail or to evaluate their feasibility. Examples include:
That Gingrich choose this kind of laundry-list approach to public policy prescriptions is not much of a surprise. He likes to be smart, even "visionary," but there has never been much evidence that he is thorough or deeply reflective. At the same time, he is prepared to make room for his partisan duties, as he does here with his analysis of Iraq, which is not uncritical but reserves space for an attack on "liberals" for the failures of pre-2001 intelligence (p. 17), and with his defense of a personal investment account option for the Social Security program. He argues hard for the importance of a balanced budget, but is clearly made uneasy by the resolute refusal of Republican Presidents, first Reagan and now George W. Bush, to produce one. Gingrich more directly picks a bone with his party over its support, or at least the President’s, of McCain-Feingold: he thinks it should be abolished, along with all other restrictions except same-day Internet reporting (p. 180). For whatever reasons, in a short space, he is uncharitable toward campaign lawyers (pp. 182, 183). All in all, through these various proposals, Gingrich sees himself as embracing approaches that are creative, favorable to entrepreneurship and public-private partnerships, and market-based. His principles of "entrepreneurial public management" capture the basic spirit of his thinking:
This is not groundbreaking material. Much of it has the ring of those short paperbacks, crowding airport bookstore shelves, on the order of Paths to Business Rejuvenation through Self-Discovery: A Zen Master’s Guide. If Gingrich had hoped to write a book enriched by the fruits of his "in-depth" study, he didn’t get it done. His purpose may have been different, more political. Having sent away, in the first pages, those whom he believed unlikely to agree with him, he concludes the book with an appeal to his devoted readers to spread word of his program far and wide. The book may have been intended more as a political tract than a work of scholarship, and as a political tract, it may work well for those fully pre-disposed to receive it warmly. There has been some word of a possible presidential candidacy in 2008, and so maybe this is the first of the campaign books. It seems likely, however, that Gingrich—the historian, who "sees broad patterns" (p. 144) in his work of defining, advocating and teaching civilization—would have had greater ambitions for this book. He has been plagued over the years by high ambitions—by a wish, once oh so close to fulfillment but then bitterly frustrated, to transcend his limitations and assume a commanding role in the political and cultural history of his times. This new book brings home the intractability of those limitations. Even the dust-jacket strikes a sorrowful note. It displays three photographs of Newt posed, in each, before a different one of our Capitol City's great structures—the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial and the United States Supreme Court—only to advise the reader that former Speaker Newt Gingrich, historian and aspiring teacher of civilization, now makes his living as a Washington consultant. |