Some blame Donald Trump. Others blame social media. And those with longer memories blame Newt Gingrich for having cut America into blue states and red states docked by mutual fear, suspicion, and alienation.
As Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999, the Republican could do more than anyone to sow the seeds of division in Washington. “Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into a blood sport, destroyed Congress and paved the way for Trump’s rise,” Atlantic magazine reflected in 2018.
But now the 77-year-old party leader, a former history professor and author of three books that triumph over Trump, must contemplate a new chapter in which the final foreign president will give way to Joe Biden, the last internal member which has promised healing, unity, and return. to the rules prior to Gingrich.
So where does the Republican party go from here? “I suppose, but I think we will be the party of common sense reform,” Gingrich says by telephone from Rome, where his wife, Callista, he is an American ambassador to the Vatican.
“You see how bureaucracies don’t work. Look at these Democratic governors who are small dictators and look at the challenges we face (whether it’s a collapsing education system, a collapsing infrastructure, competing with China) and you know the Democrats, as a union party. of government employees and liberalism, you will not be able to face any of this. “
When the dust of last month’s election ended, Marco Rubio, a Republican senator for Florida and potential White House candidate in 2024, called on the party to cool its love affair with big corporations. “The future of the party is based on a multi-ethnic and multi-racial workers’ coalition, ”he said on the Axios website.
Gingrich believes he’s already on his way, but, as seems usual among many in Trump’s orbit, he’s pivoting back to criticism from the other side. “It’s becoming partly because the left is so desperately committed to being the party of very rich people living in the enclaves, explaining that the police don’t care because they have their own security guards.”
According to him, Democrats have also succumbed to a liberal theology, echoing a point of discussion of right-wing “cultural wars.” “What you have, I think, is a Democratic party driven by a system of cultural beliefs that are now trying to drive through the school system so they can brainwash the whole next generation if they can get away with it.”
A red tsunami hit the blue wave at the polls, he continues, pointing to unexpected Republican gains in the House, victories in state legislatures and several left-wing defeats in state referendums. Highlights the praise of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, the political action committee dedicated to electing Republican women received dividends.
“What an amazing job he did. If we were liberals, the covers of all these women’s magazines would be “Republican Women’s Year,” but of course it would be politically incorrect that they couldn’t. So the only place that really is an anomaly is the presidential race. I think it’s an anomaly, so every day I find myself engaged as a historian trying to find out what’s going on with the devil. “
While there is no factual basis for this claim, Gingrich shares Trump’s view that fraud should be the explanation and has told the conservative Fox News network. “I don’t see how any reasonable human being can (you can argue about how much it was), but it’s clearly the most important thing in our lives,” he insists.
Trump’s national security department described the election as the safest in history; his justice department found no evidence of widespread election fraud; state officials, including Republicans, did not report significant irregularities; judges launched numerous Trump campaign demands.
Still, 18 Republican Attorneys General and 126 Republicans in the House supported an absurd lawsuit to invalidate millions of votes that the Supreme Court briefly gave. The failed coup was the latest measure of the spread of Trumpism to all Republican party organs.
But ultimately, Gingrich believes, Trump’s future influence over the party will depend on Trump himself. “He will continue to be a dominant figure for a fairly long period of time, depending on the intensity he wants to work on and the severity he has. People fade pretty quickly if you don’t pay attention. This is a country of enormous tranquility. “
Do you expect Trump to run for president again in 2024? “I have no idea,” admits Gingrich, who sought the Republican nomination himself in 2012. “You can certainly look [former presidents] Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland and then decide.
“If he runs, it will be very formidable and part of it will be based on what happens with Biden. If Biden ends up drifting toward a really serious recession, Trump’s temptation to continue, “I told you, would you like to go back to my economy?” it can be overwhelming. “
Biden will inherit the overlapping crises of public health, economy, racial injustice, climate and democracy. Even in calmer times, incumbent presidents tend to suffer losses in the House in the middle of their first term. With Democrats now only having a fragile majority, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy could claim the speaker’s hammer in 2022.
Gingrich, who was a member of Congress for 20 years, reflects: “As a historian, I am very happy. When [Bill] Clinton won, we got 54 seats two years later and when [Barack] Obama won, we got 63 seats two years later. I don’t know if the House Democrats are being assassinated on this scale, but I’m 99% sure McCarthy is the next speaker in the House. “
Meanwhile, Senate control depends on two escape races in Georgia early next month. If Republicans retain their narrow majority, will Biden be able to work with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell?
Gingrich, only 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 have to work with Mitch.
“Mitch’s memoirs, called The Long Game, really helped me understand him much better. He is a very long-term and very autonomous player, so he does not let him be intimidated by anything. When he finally forged an alliance with Trump, he was surprisingly productive if you’re conservative and has probably given us two generations of conservative judges.
“Particularly if we win the two seats in Georgia, which I think will, Biden will have to decide, do you want to try to become a moderate Democrat, in which case your left will rebel and go crazy? Do you want to stay with the left? In this case, nothing will be done? And Mitch will be happy with either result. “
There is a historical rhyme here with the 1990s, when Gingrich led a Republican majority against a Clinton-shaped centrist Democratic president. There may be lessons from this experience for both parties.
“It simply came to our notice then, but that’s why the left hates Clinton. He signed a welfare reform, he signed a reduction in capital gains tax, he signed four balanced budgets. It has nothing to do with his personal behavior. It is very similar to what happened to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair: both were centrists and both were brutally repudiated by their left, as they were popular in the country. It’s just fascinating stuff. “
Could Biden, who makes openings for Republicans and gives little voice to the left in his cabinet, pay a similar price? “He will.”
The Clinton vs. Gingrich years are also often cited as the beginning of the rot of American democracy. Gingrich was a political boxer who hurled insults, played on cameras and began to exploit bipartisan consensus. His 1994 contract proposals with America 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 for hiding an extramarital affair with White House fellow Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich declared it “the most systematic and deliberate cover-up of obstruction of justice and the effort to avoid the truth we have ever seen in American history.”
Looking back, do you accept the view that, among the causes of the current hyperpartisan climate in Washington, it played a role similar to a coal-fired power plant?
“We’ve been in the minority for 40 years, and unless you have a clear, vivid, polarizing message and style, you’ll be in the minority for another 40 years,” he says bluntly. “So I did my job, but I also proved time and time again that I could work with Clinton. I always worked with Democrats. It was not a pathology. It was a professional job. “
Today’s dysfunction, resentment, and tribalism cannot be fixed on a single person, but have multiple causes that deepen, acknowledges Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at the American University of Washington. But Gingrich certainly played an excessive role.
“He was the original polarizer,” Lichtman says. “When he was elected decades ago, he criticized the main Republican members of Congress because he thought they were too complacent and that they were not committed to a sufficiently vigorous political war against Democrats.
“He was also, very importantly, one of the architects of one of the most fundamental elections in modern American history, the midterm elections of 1994, when Republicans took the House and Senate for the first time since two first years of Dwight Eisenhower. Those elections also contributed greatly to polarization because it wiped out many moderate southern Democrats and replaced them with very conservative southern Republicans. “