Now we're talkin' crazy talk!
It's actually of a piece. The Donald has never given
any suggestion that big government is
anathematic to him, and Newt Gingrich has been exposed well enough as being in fact
an avatar of big government in his own way:
Gingrich is almost universally associated with opposition to big government. But that
was not actually the case. Gingrich rhetorically criticised big government. And it served his
enemies in the Clinton administration to portray Gingrich as slashing government programs.
The Gingrich-inspired "Contract with America" was generally seen as a call for smaller govern-
ment although it did not actually call for cutting a single government program. (The closest
it came was a call for zero-baseline budgeting.)
Actually, Gingrich opposed bureaucratic government---inefficient government---not big
government per se. As Gingrich said in 1994, "government plays a huge role" in society and
"anybody who believes in the American Constitution ought to believe in a fairly strong
government." He went on to say that he has "no particular beef with big government." Or,
as he has said more recently, if the bureaucracies can be reformed and made more
efficient, "the country could get excited about the opportunity to make government
work."
That is not to say that Gingrich and his followers would not like to see a smaller govern-
ment. Many changes they support would indeed reduce government bureaucracies. But
in the end, Gingrichism means "recognising that even a relatively small federal or state
government will be much bigger than anything the Founding Fathers could have dreamed
of" . . .
Make government institutions "efficient" and all else will fall into place. "As a country we
can give people better lives through better solutions by bringing government into
conformity with the enterpreneurial systems they are experiencing in the private sector."
The issue is not how big government is or how much it spends; it is whether we have
"the systems architecture that would spend it intelligently." Traditional conservatives
want the government simply to do less. But Gingrich and his fellow technophiles
believe that the right systems architecture will enable the government to provide "greater
goods and services at lower and lower costs."
This attitude gave Gingrich conservatism its appearance of optimism. Rather than being
against big government, Gingrich could be for reform. "We need to move from a 'no,
because' to a 'yes, if' approach to government policy." Former representative Vin Weber,
one of Gingrich's followers, has also sounded the call for reforming government, rather
than cutting it:
Conservatives have to do better than simply bash government. We
have to lead the way toward reform of government. We need to look at the whole
government and think about how to empower the consumers of government
benefits, rather the bureaucracy. Conservatives who simply look to abolish
agencies are going to be disappointed, but conservative reformers still have an
open field.
Thus one could say of Gingrich's conservatism, "while this view did indeed see the
federal government as the source of many of the nation's troubles, it did not hold
that the problem was federal power as such. Change those wielding federal power,
and the power could be harnessed to the ends of conservative reform". . .
Gingrich once called for abolishing the Department of Education, but he has since
become an enthusiastic supporter of federal government involvement in education. He
endorsed President Clinton's plan for the federal government to finance 100,000 new
teachers and called for the government to provide Internet access to all Americans
and computers to every four-year-old. He has proposed paying students for taking
difficult math and science courses.
Energy policy is another area where Gingrich . . . support(s) massive government inter-
vention. Gingrich strongly supports the Bush administration's investment in trying to
build hydrogen-powered vehicles. But that's only the start. He would support a host
of public-private partnerships, investments in alternative fuels, and conservation
measures. Almost anything goes, as long as it involves new technology . . .
(F)ar from leading conservatism back to the philosophy of Reagan and Goldwater,
Gingrich's ideas for a technocratic, efficient, and bigger federal government have
helped drive it toward the big-government conservatism that drives it today.
---Michael Tanner, in
Leviathan on the Right: How Big Government Conservatism
Brought Down the Republican Revolution. (Washington: Cato Institute, 2007.)
Mr. Tanner cited, among other documents, Gingrich's own foreward to Alvin and Heidi
Toffler's
Creating a New Civilisation: The Politics of the Third Wave (Gingrich
himself was so influenced by
The Third Wave* he made it mandatory reading
for new Republican Congressmen while he was Speaker of the House); two Gingrich
essays published in
The Wall Street Journalin 2001; a feature on Gingrich in
Washington Technology's January 1995 issue; a Gingrich speech to the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2000; Tod Lindberg's analysis "Gin-
grich Lost and Found" in
Policy Review (the April-May 1999 issue); and, Gingrich's
speech to the American Enterprise Institute in February 2005.
(*---In case you were wondering, in
The Third Wave Alvin Toffler said the Constitution
"is increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and danger-
ous to our welfare" and, thus, ought to "die and be replaced."
That from the book Gingrich
once called "the seminal work of our time," the book he made mandatory reading for newly-
elected Republicans during his Speakership.)
In more ways than one, The Donald inviting Newt Gingrich into any role in any Trump
administration would be the cobra inviting his own mongoose for dinner.
