The Decline and Pending Downfall of Our American Republic: Newt Gingrich (Part 1)

Newt Gingrich with Ronald Reagan: Reagan was the first Republican to be elected with an extremist agenda, and he accomplished much of it – hence, The Reagan Revolution. Newt Gingrich entered the House of Representatives during the last two years of Reagan’s tenure, determined to lead the New Right, which believed Reagan not to be extreme enough. (Photo: Gulfshorelife.com)

One of our two major political parties is threatening to renominate a man for president who was justifiably impeached two times – but was irresponsibly acquitted by loyal members of his party – and is awaiting four trials to defend himself against 91 felonies for which the evidence against him is legion. Donald J. Trump, two-time popular-vote loser (2016 and 2020), is promising to transform the executive branch’s departments and agencies into his own autocratic tools and use the federal courts and justice department to get those he considers personal or political enemies. In this series of essays, I’ve been trying to explain how the Republican Party, since WWII, has been descending step-by-step into the current anti-democracy/anti-government/anti-constitution Trump personality cult.

Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia.) was elected to the House of Representatives in 1978 and remained there until he abruptly resigned in early 1999. He early gained the moniker of Gingrich “Khan” because of his barbaric and very vocal contempt for the norms of government and contempt for his colleagues’ willingness to compromise with the House Democrats, who had held the majority since the Elections of 1954. Compromise – essential to governing a democracy – was anathema to him, although later as Speaker of the House he found it necessary to compromise with a Democratic president. The current House Trumpistas don’t know what compromise even means.

As a leader of the New Right during the Reagan-Bush Era (1981-1993), he was appalled when those two Republican administrations and moderate congressional Republicans compromised with Democrats, but he supported them on those occasions when they didn’t compromise. For instance: Predictably, in 1987, Gingrich joined those fellow Republicans who voted against the bipartisan Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 and voted to support Reagan’s veto of the bill. In general, both he and Reagan were opponents of civil rights legislation. To his chagrin, enough of his party joined the Democrats to override Reagan’s veto.

Here’s a little background on the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987: The Supreme Court was dominated by Republican appointees who were put there to undo as much popular progressive legislation as possible. In Grove City College v. Bell (1984), it had ruled that only the particular activity of an educational institution that requested federal financial aid from Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 could by denied aid because of discriminatory policies – not the entire institution. The institution could still receive aid from other federal programs for other activities that still discriminated. The Restoration Act was intended to clarify what Congress had originally intended. It specified that the entire institution could not discriminate if it wanted that federal aid. There were still pro-civil rights moderates in the Republican Party, and they joined the Democrats to override Reagan’s veto. Those moderates would not be there much longer.

Associate Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy: Although appointed by Republican presidents, each of these often sided with the moderate-left justices to defend civil liberties like abortion. However, they usually sided with right-wing justices to promote corporate and Republican Party interests. Former Justice O’Conner publicly lamented her vote to stop the vote count in Florida. (Photo: AP Photo/Bob Daughterty, File)

(The Republican-dominated Supreme Court would continue to be a tool of the right-wing extremists who wanted it to undo popular programs from the New Deal to the present. It stopped the vote count in Florida so as to allow George W. Bush to win that state and thus win the Electoral College in the Election of 2000 without winning the overall popular vote. Sadly, even the last two Republican-appointed occasional-moderates on the court – Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Conner – joined the three extremists in Bush v. Gore. Unfortunately, that ultimately allowed Mr. Bush to appoint the mostly right-wing John Roberts to be the chief justice and the controversial reactionary Samuel Alito as an associate justice.)

GOPAC, effectively a political action committee, is a Republican state and local political training organization. In 1990, it sent out a memo with a cover letter written by Mr. Gingrich, who had become the minority whip in 1989. The memo’s title was “Language, a Key Mechanism of Control.” It encouraged all Republicans “to speak like Newt.” Democrats should always be referred to as “radicals,” “sick,” and “traitors” or whatever other negative connotations the GOP decided on on a given day. Republicans themselves should always be identified positively, such as “courageous,” “principled,” or “the adults in the room.”

One goal was to de-legitimize the Democratic Party to make the Republican Party accepted as the only party qualified to be in power. Recalling Jimmy Carter being denigrated as only a peanut farmer, Gingrich and company never accepted Bill Clinton, the unwealthy hick from Arkansas, a no-account state, as being worthy of the presidency. It continued after Gingrich: Barack Obama was only a black guy from Kenya, and Joe Biden is just the father of the once drug-addicted Hunter Biden.

The future German dictator’s book My Struggle was not only a manifesto on conquest and racial intolerance but was a “How-to Guide” on using the Big Lie to control the minds of the masses. One of Donald Trump’s former wives said that he kept a book of Hitler’s writings on his bedside table. (Photo: Franz-Peter Tschauner/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP Images)

Gingrich doubled down on the tactics of McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy accused the Democrats of being the party of treason – communists, socialists, fellow travelers – utilizing the lessons of the Big Lie, which he learned from reading Mein Kampf. FDR once observed that “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.” Nevertheless, Gingrich had learned that repetition of a lie can make a large number of people “believe” the lie as the truth. The Big Lie technique has been a staple of Republican politics since WWII (via Richard Nixon and McCarthy) and has been dominant in its messages since re-emphasized by Gingrich.

“To Speak Like Newt” was the instruction given by GOPAC to all Republicans in 1990, and the party’s members have adhered to those orders ever since. (Photo: John Duricka/AP)

“To speak like Newt” has routinely been used to deflect the unpopular intentions of the Republican Party by falsely accusing the Democratic Party of doing what they themselves are actually doing. The most obvious current example of this is the Election of 2020 and its aftermath. Donald Trump made it clear that if he lost the election, he would not accept the legitimacy of the election. Joe Biden won the popular vote by around 7 million votes and also won the Electoral College vote in what has been described as one of the fairest and best-handled elections in our history. In spite of having no evidence of a fraudulent election, Trump and his loyal Trumpistas, or MAGA base, have not accepted the results. He held a “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, but who was trying to steal the election?

(To be continued)

A version of this essay was printed in south Arkansas’s El Dorado News-Times on December 3, 2023.