This surreal journey we’ve been on in the US, this endless parade of political dysfunction and kill-or-be-killed behavior and pervasive demonization, systemic misinformation, evasion of accountability and rising criminality among our representatives, is now approaching its 30th year.
While its roots go back much further, the starting gun for our current dilemma dates to 1994, when newly-minted Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich unleashed his “Contract for America”. This document, and the agenda it obscured, was the template and tone-setter for all that has followed.
Politics Gingrich-style represented a sea change in US governance. Gone were the days of coalition-building, across-the-aisle cooperation, reasoned debate and bipartisan compromise; the GOP under Gingrich resolved that these tools of leadership would be forever set aside, replaced by an unflinching dedication to winner-take-all dominance.
Democratic lawmakers would be frozen out of committees and legislative process under Republican majorities; moderate GOP members would be shown the back door; the endgame, per Gingrich’s successors, would be One-Party Rule in the United States.
What caused Gingrich to usher in such a draconian status quo? What caused him to make war on the cooperative governance that had created and grown the middle class, empowered an unprecedented era of national accomplishment and international cooperation, and promoted so much technological and cultural advancement?
We learned a few years ago that the answer is: the zoo.
In 2018, Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins interviewed Gingrich at the Philadelphia Zoo, where the ex-Speaker metaphorically revealed the core of the political philosophy he imposed upon the nation so long ago, a philosophy that has motivated all of his political action since 1958.
When he arrived in Washington as a fresh-faced Congressman, “Gingrich had a plan,” wrote Coppins. “The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself.”
At the time, “lawmakers had largely coalesced around a stabilizing set of norms and traditions,” wrote Coppins. “Entrenched committee chairs may have dabbled in petty corruption, and Democratic leaders may have pushed around the Republican minority when they were in a pinch, but as a rule, comity reigned. ‘Most members still believed in the idea that the Framers had in mind,’ says Thomas Mann, a scholar who studies Congress. ‘They believed in genuine deliberation and compromise... and they had institutional loyalty.’”
They also saw legislating as their primary function. They were, after all, lawmakers. Gingrich and the colleagues he gathered around his cause had no interest at all in legislating.
“Gradually, [Congress] went from legislating, to the weaponization of legislating, to the permanent campaign, to the permanent war,” Mann said. “It’s like he took a wrecking ball to the most powerful and influential legislature in the world.”
The model of Republican dysfunction, in Gingrich’s mind, was GOP minority leader Bob Michel, who believed “the best way to serve conservatism, and his country, was by working honestly with Democratic leaders – pulling legislation inch by inch to the right when he could, and protecting the good faith that made aisle-crossing possible,” according to Coppins.
“He represented a culture which had been defeated consistently,” Gingrich commented. He was happy to do all he could to destroy that conciliatory culture.
He would do it, he had long since decided, by replacing the processes in place at the time of his arrival – processes personified by Michel – with the Law of the Jungle. Taking his cue from primatologist Frans de Waal – whose work Gingrich grossly misinterprets – he adopted the thesis that politics is (and should be a haven for brutality and ugliness, as in the chimpanzee world, “part of an evolutionary heritage we share with our close relatives,” in de Waal’s words.
To that end, he picked up the mimicry of chimpanzee feces-throwing, recruiting a dozen Congressmen to “stalk the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras,” according to Coppins. These 12, the “Conservative Opportunity Society”, became the backbone of Gingrich’s congressional revolution. The idea was to learn from the animal kingdom and apply its lessons, to see it for what it is - “a very competitive, challenging world, at every level.”
Coppins challenged him, questioning the viciousness of this mindset. “It’s not viciousness,” Gingrich objected. “It’s natural.”
That viciousness came to define Gingrich-style politics.
“During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat — replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism — that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction,” wrote Coppins.
That viciousness – of which Gingrich is proud – long preceded his congressional tenure. It is present in a speech he gave in 1978 to the College Republicans in Atlanta:
“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he said. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”
He admonished them, as the generation to come, to “raise hell,” to abandon being “nice,” and to realize that politics is, at its core, a “war for power,” in Coppins’ reporting.
That war expanded to include the demonization, not only of all Democrats, but of moderate Republicans. It became a core tenet of Gingrich conservatism that moderate Republicans weren’t Republicans at all, and had no place in his new order. And today, of course, they are all but extinct.
Another tenet is one he may have taken from Donald Trump, who would mark the apogee of the Gingrich movement – grab the microphone 24/7 and keep the cameras on you at all times.
“If you’re not in The Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist,” he once said. His secret to capturing headlines was simple, per Coppins: “The No. 1 fact about the news media is they love fights … When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.”
In hindsight, “Noise became a proxy for status,” he told Coppins, and it’s easy to see that Trump has validated the premise in spades.
Decades later, he’s utterly pleased with the result:
“Twenty-five years after engineering the Republican Revolution, Gingrich can draw a direct line from his work in Congress to the upheaval now taking place around the globe,” Coppins wrote. “But as he surveys the wreckage of the modern political landscape, he is not regretful. He’s gleeful.”
“Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence,” wrote Coppins, and this best summarizes what the Gingrich revolution has done to the modern world. We have devolved; by eschewing cooperation for competition, we have taken a giant step backward, millions of years in time, to the landscape of kill-or-be-killed. All the progress we’d made during civilization’s tenure – culminating in the American Experiment – is discarded, in Gingrich’s twisted model.
“Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization,” said the Russian philosopher/historian Peter Kropotkin. And that’s exactly right (it’s also what we learn from Frans de Waal, when we read his work non-selectively).
And today, as 2023 gets underway, the world can see the horrific flaw in the Gingrich model. As the barely-in-the-majority GOP House of Representatives struggled to elect a new speaker, a group of young Gingrich emulates took Congress hostage, refusing front runner Kevin McCarthy the speaker’s gavel unless he acquiesced to their laundry list of demands. McCarthy ultimately prevailed, in a three-day horror show of institutional crisis that saw him rejected 14 times in formal vote, as his opponents extracted more and more from him, weakening him beyond any speaker in modern memory. The spectacle was a global embarrassment for all the world to see, with Congressmen almost coming to blows on live television.
And yet this is what they all signed up for. Did any of them suppose (and did Gingrich, for that matter) that competition extended only to Republican vs. Democrat? Did any of them stop to question whether Gingrich-style, winner-take-all politics get suspended when Republicans are at odds?
No, they didn’t; and we all watched as they unleashed Newt viciousness upon one another, as bad or worse than any they routinely dispense to Democrats.
The reason is clear and simple. When Newt came to town, he was seeking to “fix” Congress, which was actually working just fine, and had been for many years. It was getting the people’s business done. The only “fixing” Newt did was to elevate the GOP and diminish the Democrats. And that is social dominance – and only social dominance. The province of the lion and the chimpanzee. And after almost 30 years of culling out the Bob Michels in the GOP, there is nothing left but social dominance.
The GOP is now nothing but an attack dog, and the dog has finally caught the car. There’s nothing left to do in the House chamber but watch the anti-McCarthy Chaos Caucus lash out, for the rest of this congressional term, at their perceived enemies. Feces will fly, and viciously; but that’s an essential element of the Gingrich script.
Meanwhile, the chamber’s 212 Democrats are popping popcorn – and realizing what a mess they’ll have to clean up when the Gingrich play finally clears the stage.
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