Newt Gingrich is Correct About American Politics
There really is a true conflict, and the left needs to get in the game
Don’t listen to people who tell you that America’s political problems start and end with Donald Trump. Don’t listen to people who are shocked by the current “semi-fascist” state of the U.S. Republican Party. Don’t listen to people who pin the current state of American politics on Fox News or social media.
Does that sound harsh? Perhaps you’re someone who thinks these things. But I wish that American liberals and leftists would leave these ideas behind because they aren’t true.
Newt Gingrich came along far before all of that. When Donald Trump was just the “failson” of a racist and dishonest developer in Queens, Newt Gingrich was plotting to put the reactionary impulses that have never been far from power in the U.S. back into the driver’s seat of national politics.
According to a very illuminating interview he gave to MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki last year as a postscript to Kornacki’s podcast The Revolution about the process leading up to the 1994 congressional elections, Gingrich expected the process of building a truly right-wing GOP congressional majority to take far less time than it ultimately did. He thought it would take about four to six years; from his entry into the House, it took sixteen. Yet he also appreciated traits that today’s American left could learn from if it actually wanted to bother winning power: endurance and persistence. Talking with Kornacki, he compares his own effort to try to win a right-wing GOP House majority to historical military campaigns that suffered repeated defeats and few victories.
Both Kornacki and Gingrich stress the importance of Gingrich’s mastery of media. Gingrich says of various dominant political figures in the U.S. that “every generation’s leadership has to understand the technology of communication for that generation”, going back to mail for the Jacksonians, through television for JFK. The communications tech Gingrich mastered, reshaping how the GOP operated, was C-SPAN.
Again, this is over a decade and a half before the creation of Fox News.
Has the contemporary U.S. left-of-center ever thought this way? This broadly and this far ahead? Has the left’s use of media, let alone mastery of it, ever been on the agenda as a tool for building power? I’m not even thinking of the liberal attempt to mimic right-wing talk radio, the late unlamented Air America. Has the actual American left even had the thought that contemporary media technology without a clear ideological coding, like podcasts, nano-videos like TikTok, or Instagram, could be used in a disciplined way to consolidate and build left power?
Gingrich found, in C-SPAN, a tool that had just been created, and he then mastered it and used it to bring his ideology to power. A degree of power that it has had ever since.
Chapo Trap House could never achieve such a thing.
How did it come to be that the American right, the force behind slavery, Jim Crow, and oligarchy, has a deeper respect for playing the long game and mastering the communication technologies that will keep them in contact with ordinary Americans than the supposed party of the people does?
The irony of the current political dynamic in the United States is that the left is so weak that all the best lessons in effective political populism and organizing come from the right now.
Why? Because the right has been in the arena trying to build and consolidate power for fifty years, while the left has abandoned the field. In part, the left has gone into academia, but also into independent writing and niche commentating — all safe perches on the sidelines from which to be jaded and apathetic. It has given up doing what it actually takes to change anything, then in a flurry of triumphant cynicism it declares that nothing will ever change.
The contrast with Gingrich, who started his professional life with a stint as an academic, but then went into the arena with goals for his side that were ambitious, yet clear and practical, could not be clearer.
He was entrepreneurial and inventive with the opportunities he did have, and full of optimism, whereas today’s left is either disdainful of electoral politics or whiny about its procedural and institutional unfairnesses like the existence of the U.S. Senate.
The contemporary U.S. left has a lazy and entitled sense that the fact that U.S. political culture does not naturally cater to leftist preferences in candidates, rhetoric, or priorities means it is hopelessly corrupt and beneath engagement. There is no simple honest reckoning with the reality of the situation that political cultures have to be actively shaped into providing what you want. In politics, you do not sit down and wait for the waiter to come to your table with the perfect menu; you build the restaurant yourself.
From that reckoning, the American left could choose to say that it has a lot of work to do, but that building the social and political power to achieve a political culture that gives it what it wants is possible. Goals and means, grounded in plain talk, could make inventive possibilities realistic.
“Look,” Gingrich said, “If you’re a guerrilla movement, which is what we were, and you’re the minority of the minority, any sign of hope helps. … We were trying to take a moribund Republican base that was defeated in the ’70s, had lost any sense of purpose, and we were trying to get them re-energized with real ideas.”
Sound familiar, U.S. liberals and leftists? Perhaps not exactly. When was the last time we as the American left of center admitted that we are the minority in the country? When was the last time we had a sense that we needed unconventional methods because the established methods were not making headway?
Could we think of ourselves, as a guerrilla movement?
Don’t just take notes, American leftists, although you should fill notebooks with them. Act on them.
The left can also, if it chooses, face up to the overall socio-political situation, which Gingrich describes in the interview with perfect directness.
“We’re in the middle of a cultural civil war. The gap between the left and the right is as big as it’s been at any time in modern America, and it’s genuine and it’s deep. And so, each side would love to have civility on their terms. Neither side is prepared to have civility on the other side’s terms. … The tensions are a reflection of reality, they’re not the cause of reality.”
So often the American left has denied this social and political reality, holding to one hope in the midst of its cynicism: the belief that there is a huge, untapped working-class vote for leftism in the United States. A “silent majority”, if you will.
The silent majority that the right imagined in the very late 1960s and 1970s was entirely real, delivering near-total victories in 1972 and 1984. The actual silent majority helped the right build their now-dominant position. On the other hand, the current leftist idea of a dominant working class only waiting for the right guy to lead them to revolution strikes me as a cop-out, a Populus Ex Machina that will let them avoid the hard work of building actual power.
For their part, American liberals have made civility into the ultimate virtue, if not an actual idol. Perhaps some would even welcome civility on the right’s terms, just to have it back. Just to pretend this all isn’t happening. We’re pretty far down the road to that, already.
But the blunt reality is that, of course, this conflict is real. There really are two incompatible worldviews. We really don’t all have the same understanding of human nature or what makes a good society. We are fighting (on the rare days when the left-of-center blinkingly remembers it has enemies) over which one will win out.
It can’t be wished away. “Only in America”, though, would “there is an ideological conflict in the country” be hard to say. Countries have ideological conflicts all the time! They are the most ordinary thing.
So, if you don’t like “American exceptionalism” and if you think that’s a deluded thing that shouldn’t exist, get to grips with the idea: America is in an ideological conflict between two sides who can’t and won’t compromise because they actually have two different worldviews and moral systems. One side is going to win, and the other side is going to lose. Conservatives are going literally everything they can to make sure they are the winners.
This is an entirely normal thing, in the sweep of history and global reality. Post-war China, the revolution-era Russian Empire, apartheid South Africa, and Spain after its civil war: all places where there was a genuine contest that one side decisively won in victories that lasted decades.
Of course, Gingrich is a figure of his moment; he argued against identifying the U.S. House with the Democratic Party, which is something that perhaps happened in the 1970s and 1980s when he was building power, but which sounds entirely alien to members of my own Millennial generation. If anything, we might over-identify the U.S. House with the party of Gingrich, the modern Republican Party that “the man from Georgia ‘’ and other white southern right-wing leaders and foot soldiers did so much to build.
And of course, he ruminates in the interview over long-past partisan contests, with rather obvious fastidious righteousness about the supposedly corrupt actions of the Democrats.
All that aside, he’s right. There is no abstract condition of “polarization” in the United States. There’s just a genuine ideological contest between movement conservatism and multiracial liberal social democracy, and the latter has not yet woken up to the fact.
It’s been going on for decades, long before Donald Trump came on the scene.
It’s far past time for everyone to the left of Joe Manchin to accept that and then get to work.
