Brilliant,
but scary
By
Richard W. Crockett
Newt
Gingrich is brilliant, but scary.
When I say that he is brilliant I am talking about his impressive mental
acuity. When I say that he is
scary I am talking about the substance of what he believes about our
institutions of government. He preaches through the rhetoric of patriotism, but
beneath the surface he is an avowed nationalist in international politics and
gives the appearance of a low commitment to our present institutional
arrangements in domestic affairs.
Think of patriotism as loyalty not only to the nation, but also to the
American consensus—that agreement on the fundamental rules of the
political game which, made at the founding of the republic, is embodied in and
represented by the Constitution.
This includes all of our rights and privileges found in the Bill of
Rights. When I say that Gingrich
is a nationalist, I am referring to his propensity to wave the flag in behalf
of our nation, but not in behalf of our institutions of government, including
our Constitution.
In
his critique of the Bush Administration war strategy, Gingrich has correctly
declared, Òstubbornness is not a strategy.Ó He argues that what we need to do
in Iraq is a kind of ÒCCC,Ó referring to the Roosevelt New Deal Civilian Conservation
Corps, which would employ idle Iraqis constructively. The goal is to keep them
from killing each other and from killing Americans. Of course if such a program had been employed from the
beginning it may have had real merit, but today I fear it is too little, too
late.
My
real concerns are raised when considering GingrichÕs notions of American
domestic governance. He argues
plausibly that, Òall of our instruments of power are brokenÓ and implausibly
that what we need to do is Òfundamentally restructure these instruments of national power.Ó (Emphasis mine.) He cites as broken institutions the
Departments of Defense, State, and, remarkably, Justice, among others. He
frighteningly justifies that we revamp government to Òmeet the threat.Ó For Gingrich,
this explicitly means abandoning civil liberties and personal freedom in favor
of national security. Of course history is filled with examples of petty
tyrants and serious tyrants alike employing the fear of a foreign threat to
justify the oppression of a domestic population. Both the fear and the threat may be genuine, but the danger
is in who political leadership uses the fear against.
He
cleverly wraps himself in the cloak of Lincoln, who at the time of the Civil
War, faced a genuine domestic crisis and probably exceeded the constitutional
powers of his office, in order to preserve the nation and its liberties. In contrast, Gingrich raises the fear
of an external threat to diminish our liberties. This represents a continuation of the neo-conservative
strategy of George W. Bush and is an ideology, which has been used to curtail
liberty upon the pretext of a Òwar on terror,Ó wherein the enemy creeps among
us. It is true that we were attacked on 9-11, but we quickly lost site of that
war and started another one.
The
American public has been conditioned to embrace this Òrestructuring
institutionsÓ pitch by a Republican Party doctrine, which is suspicious and
even skeptical of government institutions and of domestic regulatory power. The argument is simply that the
government is notoriously inefficient and incompetent at exercising responsible
power.
So
if in conducting his presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich frames the debate in
this way, he is employing a strategy which exploits the public frustration and
impatience with corruption, the Katrina aftermath, and the war in Iraq, and he
can present himself as a Republican alternative to the Bush team disaster and
can look like a solution to it rather than looking like a continuation of it.
But
let the buyer beware! If we restructure government along more efficient lines
in order to ward off foreign threats, real or imagined, we may wind up with a
hole in our foot and a smoking gun in our hand. For more efficient governments are rarely democratic. Policy choices in these governments can
be made free of politics and herein is where the danger lies. If we attempt to streamline in the name
of efficiency and national security by eradicating politics, we may also find
that that we have eradicated democracy and with it most of our civil
liberties. Hans
Buchheim, a refugee of the Nazi regime in Germany, has written that the single
most important characteristic of totalitarian rule is the total absence of
politics. Virtually every failing
of our institutions of government has little to do with the structure of
government, but rather has to do with its occupants. Rather than electing persons to office who make a political
career out of assailing the institutions of government as bloated and inefficient--those
who donÕt even like government and are dedicated to undermining it-- the
solution is to elect persons who have a philosophy, which is dedicated to
making government work.