THE STUMP DECEMBER 16, 2011
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[Guest post by Simon van Zuylen-Wood]
Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of Newt Gingrich’s highly puzzling ascendance is his popularity among Tea Party voters. As of December 6 he was the overwhelming Tea Party favorite, with 47% of their support. (This enthusiasm may have flagged amid the targeted attacks Newt’s opponents have been deploying this week.) Gingrich’s lead could be a passing fad, but while it lasts, he’s got the Tea Party to thank. His numbers among “moderates/liberals” and “Tea Party nonsupporters” are virtually identical to Romney’s. The Gingrich surge, in other words, is quite similar to the Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain surges. But why Gingrich, of all people?
Here is a candidate who epitomizes K Street insiderism with self dealing and quasi-lobbying gigs. He has violated ostensibly sacrosanct principles of social conservatism. Perhaps most damningly, he has supported an individual health care mandate and affirmed the existence of climate change. So “progressive” is Gingrich, Glenn Beck said last weekend, only his whiteness distinguishes him from Barack Obama. This was evidence enough for Beck to conclude that Gingrich owed his Tea Party support to racism. A titillating theory to be sure, but probably not the right one.
In fact, there are more likely hypotheses. Perhaps the Tea Party has rewarded Gingrich for his incendiary rhetoric and Obama-bashing. Maybe it’s just trying him on for size and will lose enthusiasm as details about his past unfurl. Or it could be that Tea Party voters fondly recall Speaker Gingrich’s zeal for slashing basic government programs and his willingness to undercut moderate Republicans. David Axelrod suggested as much when he called him an “original Tea Partier” this week.
I suspect part of the surge, however, is rooted neither in his policies nor personality. It’s his shtick as a historian. Gingrich’s pedantic style is an improbable selling point for a bloc suspicious of elites and academics. What resonates, however, is probably not his intellectual pretensions, but his nuance-free version of history.
Historian Gingrich has two modes. Sometimes he cites his own expertise to justify non-factual, extremist bait (see his claim during last weekend’s debate that Palestinians were an “invented” people). More often, however, he cherry-picks parables most likely to resonate with a conservative audience. John Smith, he’s been saying for several decades, told early colonists, “if you don’t work, you won’t eat.” Gingrich is also fond of a bland section of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, unrelated to the law itself, which he cites to attack the modern secular "education establishment.” Or take his perspective on Henry Ford, whose wealth Gingrich used as proof of the “one percent’s” job creating potential. (Gingrich tends not to mention Ford’s minimum wage hikes, which Obama referred to in his recent Kansas speech.) Gingrich's selective memory is not new—I highlight some more brazen examples in my piece on the class Gingrich taught in the mid-1990s.
This sort of scholarship is right up the Tea Party's alley. Over the last few years, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and the rest have claimed the mantle of American history by celebrating a very narrow version of it. The conceit of the whole movement, of course, draws from the symbolism of one Revolutionary-era event. Gingrich, armed with a superior grasp of the facts, does a better Tea Party than the Tea Party itself. As Glenn Beck (who would know) said last weekend, “He knows which part [of history] to highlight and which to sweep under the carpet.”
8 comments
Here's another example of Gingrich's knowing what to "sweep under the carpet." Today, Gingrich wraps himself in Reagan's halo; back when Reagan was president, Gingrich slammed Reagan. See Mark Shield's column today, here http://www.creators.com/liberal/mark-shields/newt-rewrites-his-reagan-connection.html Excerpt: ==================== Just like when Newt went to the House floor during the Gipper's second White House term and declared the president's Soviet policy a "failure." Here is what Gingrich said: "Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire's challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing and without a dramatic, fundamental change in strategy will continue to fail. ... The burden of the failure frankly must be placed first upon President Reagan." This was after Gingrich, as reported in the Congressional Record, had found Reagan responsible for our national "decay": "Beyond the obvious indicators of decay, the fact is that President Reagan has lost control of the national agenda." Students of Newt-speak will recognize that by "decay," Gingrich was generally referring to factors such as crime, illegitimate births and illiteracy. ======================== Dan
- dbuck1
December 16, 2011 at 4:39pm
I'll take the bait (again). What do the tea partiers think about their favorite founder's proposal for generational sovereignty. Home owner debt relief run amok!
- rayward
December 16, 2011 at 4:50pm
From my perspective, which is all I have, the Tea Party favors a candidate until someone comes and tells them that they shouldn't be favoring that candidate. Maybe all voters are like that, but the fickle Tea Partiers do it with a higher rate of transference.
- Nusholtz
December 16, 2011 at 8:30pm
I have found with a movement (of older people taking big government subsidies as a percent of the Federal budget) that they are so narcissitc to think of themselves as true revolutionaries as they do whatever FOX, et. al tell them to do.
- MikeB.
December 17, 2011 at 9:18am
dbuck1: quoting Gingrich on struggle against the Soviet Union. Certainly, one of the signal traits of the Soviet Union was the constant "rewriting" of history, back in the days when governments had to do do with actual paper and scissors. Given Gingrich's ability to rewrite history so quickly and deftly, perhaps Stalin is slowly spinning in his grave with admiration.
- skahn
December 17, 2011 at 10:42pm
I totally agree with this post. The Tea Party, the Conservative Movement, and Right Wing Radio are all about pseudo-intellectualism. Their basic algorithm is to take an emotional stance held by angry (largely white) people and affirm it with references to "first principles" supposedly enshrined in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the writings of the Founding Fathers, or if a stretch is really necessary, the principles of Natural Law. The arguments made allow the audience to feel both emotionally affirmed and intellectually enlightened, not to mention the fact that wearing a tri-corn hat is just plain fun. But of course, these arguments don't take into account alternative interpretations of the supposedly sacred documents, the fact that there is no common agreement on which documents are actually part of the canon, and the fact that often times an issue is thorny precisely because it puts two "first principles" into opposition with each other. No, it's just pick and choose whichever "first principle" and "sacred document" that affirms your gut, and then take those ideas to whatever ridiculous extreme is necessary to convince yourself that your right.
- NateG
December 18, 2011 at 6:10pm
It's political philosophy for people who enjoy the grand sweep of history, but who are too angry and too lazy to strive for subtle, objective interpretations.
- NateG
December 18, 2011 at 6:14pm
Gingrich gets away with peddling his tendentious history because he's pedantic and self-assured while he's doing it, and can always answer a follow-up question. Which is in stark contrast to people like Palin, Bachmann or Perry, who present the same bogus history but clearly don't understand just what the hell they are saying.
- wildboy
December 19, 2011 at 10:41am