Newt Gingrich and the Dawn of a Toxic Political Era
To hear President Trump use the term, “corruption” can do double duty as a hand grenade and a safe word — a ready-made epithet to yell out whenever he’s feeling the squeeze.
It’s a tried-and-true strategy in the frantic trajectory of American politics since the 1970s. As Julian Zelizer shows in his briskly entertaining (if politically dispiriting) new book, “Burning Down the House,” an ambitious and impatient Republican from Georgia by the name of Newton Leroy Gingrich long ago figured out that corruption was a useful charge for a young upstart to deploy against establishment politicians — a way of turning their vaunted experience against them. More political experience meant more connections with powerful constituents, which meant more of a chance that some of those connections smelled bad, or could be made to seem that way.
Gingrich’s lasting innovation, Zelizer says, was to turn a rhetorical gambit into an actionable weapon. “Burning Down the House” looks at Gingrich before his lofty Contract With America and his down-and-dirty government shutdown, before he became President Bill Clinton’s archnemesis as a gleefully obstructionist speaker of the House.
So much that’s associated with the Republican Party under Trump, Zelizer argues — the rowdiness, the bare-knuckle name-calling, the white-knuckle clinging to power at all cost — dates back to Gingrich’s ascent in the late ’80s. Gingrich went from being a junior member of Congress on the fringes of the minority party to the center of Republican leadership by destroying the long legislative career of Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker of the House. “We can date precisely the moment when our toxic political environment was born,” Zelizer declares. “Speaker Wright’s downfall in 1989.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/books/review-burning-down-house-newt-gingrich-julian-zelizer.html
When the day comes I will gladly dance on Gingrich's grave.
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