ssome blame Donald Trump. Others blame social media. And those with older memories blame Newt Gingrich for dividing America into blue states and red states plagued by mutual fear, suspicion and alienation.
As a spokesman for the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999, the Republican probably did more than anyone else to plant the division’s seeds in Washington. “Newt Gingrich turned party battles into bloody sports, destroyed Congress and paved the way for Trump’s rise,” reflected Atlantic magazine in 2018.
But now the 77-year-old nobleman, a former history professor and author of three books celebrating Trump, must contemplate a new chapter in which the ultimate outsider paves the way for Joe Biden, the final insider who has promised healing, unity and a return to pre-Gingrich standards.
So, where does the Republican Party go from here? “I’m guessing, but I think we’re going to be the common sense reform party,” said Gingrich by phone from Rome, where his wife, Callista, is an American ambassador to the Vatican.
“You look at the degree to which bureaucracies don’t work. You look at these petty dictatorial Democratic governors and look at the challenges we face – be it a collapsing educational system, a collapsing infrastructure, competing with China – and you know that Democrats, like the party of labor unions in the government and liberalism, will not be able to deal with any of this. “
As the dust for last month’s elections settled, Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida and a potential candidate for the White House in 2024, asked the party to cool his love affair with big corporations. “The future of the party is based on a multiethnic and multiracial coalition of the working class,” he told Axios.
Gingrich believes he is already on his way, but, as seems usual among many in Trump’s orbit, he again pivots criticism from the other side. “It is becoming that, in part because the left is so desperately committed to being the party of very wealthy people living in enclaves, explaining that the police don’t matter because they have their own security guards.”
Democrats have also succumbed to a liberal theology, he argues, echoing a right-wing line of “cultural wars”. “What you have, I think, is a Democratic party driven by a cultural belief system that they are now trying to conduct across the school system so that they can brainwash the entire next generation, if they can get away with it.”
A red tsunami hit the blue wave in polls, he continues, pointing to unexpected Republican gains in the House, victories in state legislatures and several defeats for left-wing causes in state referendums. He praises Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, whose political action committee dedicated to electing Republican women has reaped fruit.
“What an incredible job she did. If we were liberal, the covers of all these women’s magazines would be ‘The Year of the Republican Woman’, but of course, that would be so politically incorrect that they couldn’t do that. So the only place that is really an anomaly is the presidential race. I think it’s an anomaly, so I find myself involved as a historian every day trying to figure out what the hell is going on. “
While there is no factual basis for this claim, Gingrich shares Trump’s view that fraud should be the explanation and said it on the conservative Fox News network. “I don’t see how any reasonable human being can – you can argue how much it cost – but it is clearly the biggest in our lives,” he insists.
Trump’s homeland security department described the election as the safest in history; his justice department found no evidence of widespread electoral fraud; state officials, including republicans, did not report significant irregularities; judges rejected several lawsuits from the Trump campaign.
Still, 18 Republican Attorneys General and 126 House Republicans supported an absurd action to invalidate millions of votes that was rejected by the Supreme Court. The failed coup was the latest measure of the spread of Trumpism to all organs of the Republican Party.
But ultimately, Gingrich believes, Trump’s future dominance over the party will depend on Trump himself. “He will remain a dominant figure for a very long period of time, depending on how hard he wants to work and how serious he is. People disappear very quickly if they don’t pay attention. This is a country of enormous concern. “
Does he expect Trump to run for president again in 2024? “I have no idea,” admits Gingrich, who sought the Republican nomination in 2012. “He can certainly look at [former presidents] Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland and then make their own decision.
“If he runs, it will be formidable and part of it will be based on what happens to Biden. If Biden ends up in a really serious recession, Trump will be tempted to say, ‘I warned you, would you like to go back to my economy?’ it can be overwhelming. “
Biden will inherit overlapping crises of public health, economics, racial injustice, climate and democracy. Even in more serene times, incumbent presidents typically suffer losses in the House in the middle of their first term. With Democrats now holding only a fragile majority, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy can claim the speaker’s hammer in 2022.
Gingrich, who has been a member of Congress for 20 years, ponders: “As a historian, I am very cheerful. When [Bill] Clinton won, we won 54 seats two years later and when [Barack] Obama won, we won 63 seats two years later. I don’t know if House Democrats will be slaughtered on that scale, but I’m 99% sure that McCarthy is the next House Speaker. “
Senate control, in turn, depends on two runoff runs in Georgia early next month. If Republicans preserve their narrow majority, will Biden be able to work with majority leader Mitch McConnell?
Gingrich, just seven months younger than the president-elect, says bluntly: “He will have no choice. This is the genius of the American system. But if he doesn’t want to do anything, he doesn’t need to work with Mitch.
“Mitch’s memories, called The Long Game, really helped me understand him a lot better. He is a long-time player and is very self-sufficient, so he is not intimidated by anything. When he finally formed an alliance with Trump, it was surprisingly productive if you are a conservative and has probably given us two generations of conservative judges.
“Particularly, if we win the two seats in Georgia, which I think we will achieve, Biden will have to decide, he wants to try to be a moderate Democrat, in which case his left will rebel and go crazy, or he wants to stay with the left, in which case nothing will be done? And Mitch will be happy with any of the results. “
There is a historical rhyme here with the 1990s, when Gingrich led a Republican majority against a Democratic center president in the form of Clinton. There can be lessons from this experience for both sides.
“An immense amount has been made, but that is also why the left hates Clinton. He signed the pension reform, he signed a capital gains tax cut, he signed four balanced budgets. It has nothing to do with your personal behavior. It is very similar to what happened to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair: the two were centrists and were cruelly repudiated by their left, even though they were popular in the country. It is simply fascinating. “
Could Biden, who is opening up to Republicans and giving little voice to the left in his office, pay a similar price? “He goes.”
The Clinton v Gingrich years are also often cited as the beginning of rot in American democracy. Gingrich was a political boxer who launched insults, represented the cameras and started to explode the bipartisan consensus. His 1994 Contract with America proposals helped Republicans win a majority in the House for the first time in four decades.
Clinton was accused of lying under oath and obstructing justice to conceal an extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich declared this “the most systematic and deliberate cover-up of obstruction of justice and effort to avoid the truth we have seen in American history.”
Looking back, does he accept the view that, among the causes of the current hyperpartisan climate in Washington, he played a role similar to that of a coal-fired power plant?
“We were in the minority for 40 years, and unless you had a clear, vivid and polarizing message and style, you would be in the minority for another 40 years,” he says frankly. “So I did my job, but I also proved repeatedly that I could work with Clinton. I worked with Democrats all the time. It was not a pathology. It was a professional job. “
Today’s dysfunction, bitterness and tribalism cannot be attributed to a single person, but they have several causes that go deeper, acknowledges Allan Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington. But Gingrich certainly played a disproportionate role.
“He was the original polarizer,” says Lichtman. “A long time ago, when he was first elected, decades ago, he criticized the top Republican members of Congress because he thought they were too acquiescent and were not involved in a sufficiently vigorous political war against Democrats.
“He was also, very importantly, one of the architects of one of the most important elections in modern US history, the 1994 mid-term elections, when Republicans took over the House and Senate for the first time since the first two years. by Dwight Eisenhower. This election also contributed a lot to the polarization because it eliminated many moderate Democrats from the south and replaced them with very conservative Republicans from the south. ”