Monday, December 12, 2011 12:06:28 AM
Your Daily Newt: The Speaker as Anti-Colonial Samurai
Wikimedia Commons; Courtesy of the US House of Representatives
By Tim Murphy
Thu Dec. 8, 2011 8:53 AM PST10
As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich —until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.
If you want to understand Newt Gingrich, start with what's on his book shelf. That's his advice, anyway. He assigned a reading list to his Republican caucus in 1995, and he peppers his speeches with references to writers like French existentialist Albert Camus. And as Connie Bruck explained in her epic 1995 New Yorker profile [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/09/1995_10_09_050_TNY_CARDS_000374071 ; http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1995-10-09#folio=059 ], Gingrich was particularly influenced by a novel about a 17th-century Japanese samurai named Toranaga:
[Former campaign manager Carlyle] Gregory also said that in 1978 Gingrich was reading the novel Shogun by James Clavell, and that a major character—Toranaga, a seventeenth-century samurai warlord—had a powerful influence on him. [Gingrich's friend] Daryl Conner, too, told me that Toranaga was a critical model for Gingrich. The book is a narrative of Toranaga's quest for the absolute power of shogun. Throughout the book, Toranaga, who confides in no one, violently repudiates the suggestion of his most loyal followers that he should seek to become shogun, even calling it "treason." Yet, through his study of individuals' psychology, his patience in listening, his system of punishment and reward, his establishment of an elaborate information network of spies, and his talent in projecting a wholly false self-image (he is an accomplished Noh actor), Toranaga is able to use, manipulate, and deceive all who come in contact with him; thus, in the end, he achieves his goal.
It gets better:
He will become shogun, and, moreover (this the reader learns at the very end), it has also long been Toranaga's long-held secret plan to rid Japan of white people.
What if Gingrich is so outside our comprehension that only if you understand Japanese, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together his behavior?
*
Related
Newt in His Own Words: 33 Years of Bomb-Throwing
Gingrich is announcing he's running for president. Too bad he can't run from comments like these.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/newt-gingrich-greatest-rhetorical-hits
WATCH: Protesters Occupy Posh Newt Gingrich Fundraiser
As the GOP front-runner rustles up campaign cash, angry 99-percenters give him an earful—and a Mother Jones reporter gets tossed out.
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/newt-gingrich-fundraiser-occupy-president-video
What Newt Gingrich Isn't Telling You About His Literacy Program
The GOP candidate holds up his old nonprofit, Earning by Learning, as a way to teach kids the value of a buck. Here's what he doesn't mention.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/newt-gingrich-earning-by-learning (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69719515 )
13 Reasons Why Newt Will Never Be the GOP Nominee
Sure, his poll numbers are up, for now. But soon we won't be the only ones recalling his many sordid achievements.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/13-reasons-why-newt-wont-win
Newt Gingrich Is Sad That Politics Has Gotten So Nasty
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/12/newt-gingrich-sad-politics-has-gotten-so-nasty
*
Copyright ©2011 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress (emphasis in original)
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/your-daily-newt-speaker-anti-colonial-samurai [with comments]
===
Newt Gingrich's Earning by Learning
AmericanSolutions
Posted by Sam Worley on Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 12:00 PM
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has gotten a lot of flak for his proposal to put children to work cleaning their own schools, which he suggested recently as a way to both get the kids some cash and to instill in them a sense of “pride in the schools [ http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/the-labors-of-newt.html ].” But it wasn’t till I read Connie Bruck’s fantastic 1995 New Yorker profile [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/09/1995_10_09_050_TNY_CARDS_000374071 ; http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1995-10-09#folio=050 ] of the former House speaker that I realized that this isn’t the first time Gingrich has floated the idea of paying children for their efforts to alleviate the nation’s social woes. Gingrich has been concerned about the child-unemployment rate for years. In the early 90s he founded a nonprofit organization, Earning by Learning, that aimed to get kids to read by paying them—the going rate then was $2 per book. Gingrich explained the program thusly [ http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/newt-gingrich-earning-by-learning ]: “The ice cream truck comes by. The kid who's in the program walks up and buys their own ice cream. Their friend says to them, 'How come you have money?' He goes, 'Well, I read.' So kids are showing up to the program saying, 'I demand that you let me read!'”
Reading was not, Bruck reported, the only monetizable childhood experience:
Just as one pays children to read, so one should pay students to graduate early from high school, pay teen-agers on welfare not to get pregnant, pay adults when they get good results on a cardiovascular workup, pay Medicare recipients when they find fraud—and, conversely, make high schools pay for graduating a student who turns out to have needed remedial help, and make Medicaid patients pay something, even if it is just one dollar, when they go to the doctor.
Earning by Learning wasn’t just a stupid idea, though—it was a stupid, eminently corruptible idea. As Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy blogged earlier this week [ http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/newt-gingrich-earning-by-learning (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69719515 )], a number of mid-90s investigations found that a large amount of the money that went into the program wasn’t disbursed in little $2 payments, but went into overhead—nearly half the budget for one of the program’s branches, the magazine reported in 1995, paid the salary of one staff member. And Gingrich used it as a clout machine, to which conservative politicians donated in hopes of getting into the speaker’s good graces.
Scandal may have slowed Gingrich in the 90s, but it has not stopped him. I wrote a few weeks ago [ http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2011/11/22/our-candidates-ourselves ] about Joan Didion's scathing review [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/aug/10/the-teachings-of-speaker-gingrich/?pagination=false ] of Gingrich's intellectual output—Bruck's takedown is equally satisfying to read, perhaps because it attempts to answer the question of how the guy has proven so successful:
What is remarkable about Gingrich in the end is not the degree to which he dissembles but the theatricality of his outrage when he is charged with dissembling, and the self-righteous force of his counterattack. He is, of course, not original in this—history offers plentiful examples of leaders who intimidated their critics (especially the press) by charging them with bias, and these precedents are not pretty—but Gingrich is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of this particular skill. His opponents are chameleons and demagogues, his critics are cynics and liars: it is a feat of projection amazing in its transparency, and yet, probably because it is so daring, it works.
©2011 CL Chicago, Inc.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2011/12/09/newt-gingrichs-earning-by-learning [with comment]
===
Why So Slow in Reporting on Gingrich?
Gilbert Cranberg
Posted at 3:57 pm, November 20th, 2011
What took so long? Why, many months into the presidential campaign, with Newt Gingrich at or near the top in the preference polls, did the press not raise questions sooner about his character flaws and money-grubbing ways?
Connie Bruck and the New Yorker waved warning flags about Gingrich many years ago, on Oct. 9, 1995, to be exact, in a National Magazine Award-winning profile, “The Politics of Perception” In it, Bruck came to this devastating conclusion [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/09/1995_10_09_050_TNY_CARDS_000374071 ; http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1995-10-09#folio=050 ] about Gingrich:
“It seems unlikely that in reasonably normal times in this country Gingrich could prevail in a national election. But the worse the crisis, the better for Gingrich; the greater the insecurity and despair, the more seductive his veiled scapegoating, his absolutism, his messianism would become. Gingrich plays by his own rules. By being engaged and colorful and dynamic — by staging bravura performances — he usually gets away with it on matters large and small. Gingrich has an enormous advantage in the political arena. He is free to say and do what he pleases, affording himself the kind of freewheeling latitude others can only fantasize about. That license goes unchecked, in large part, because what he does defies our most fundamental assumptions: one simply does not expect to find so consummate a con artist serving as Speaker of the House.”
The best safeguard against charlatans and con artists holding public office is an aggressive press. But instead of following up on Bruck’s insight, the press simply gave Gingrich a pass during much of the early days of the presidential preference campaign. Only when he began moving up in the polls have voters been warned by the press [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-18/gingrich-the-historian-skips-over-his-own-past-jonathan-alter.html ] that the smooth-talking historian was capable of putting a For Sale sign on the Oval Office.
The press should be scrutinizing the records and characters of all serious candidates for the White House, and not simply take its coverage cues from the polls.
© 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
http://blog.niemanwatchdog.org/?p=2480 [with comment]
===
Gingrich's Great Man Complex, from Sci-Fi to History
Reuters
Who's been influencing the former Speaker? Those with far-seeing efforts at transformation are valued most
Conor Friedersdorf
Dec 9 2011, 10:52 AM ET
Over at History News Network, Ray Smock, the historian at the House of Representatives until the 1994 Republican takeover, has a piece [ http://hnn.us/articles/newt-gingrich-galactic-historian ] up on Newt Gingrich's affinity for Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. "Newt liked the idea of one man shaping the destiny of entire civilizations. That fictional man, Hari Seldon, was a special breed of historian who frequented a far-off planet called Trantor," he writes. "Newt found his role model not in his stern stepfather, but in a historian from another planet, a great historian and teacher who thought really big galactic-size thoughts."
It's an affinity Gingrich himself has acknowledged.
"For a high school student who loved history, Asimov's most exhilarating invention was the 'psychohistorian' Hari Seldon," he once wrote. "The term does not refer to Freudian analysis but to a kind of probabilistic forecasting of the future of whole civilizations. The premise was that, while you cannot predict individual behavior, you can develop a pretty accurate sense of mass behavior."
Does Gingrich think real leaders can be so forward-thinking?
One hint comes from something he said in a 1995 New Yorker profile [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/09/1995_10_09_050_TNY_CARDS_000374071 ; http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1995-10-09#folio=050 ]:
"Let me say one last thing, because I sometimes startle people, because I'm so intense and I'm so committed to changing things quickly. In the mid-nineteen-twenties, Kemal Ataturk was in the process of modernizing Turkey. He was faced with an enormous problem. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed, the Turkish people had been driven back within the boundaries of what is now modern Turkey. They had an enormous crisis of psychology -- they were a backward country, and yet they knew their future lay in modernization and in understanding the European world and the industrial world better. And he reached the conclusion, after considerable deep and painful thought, that writing in the language pattern they had written in no longer would work, and that they had to change literally the basic script of their language to a Western script.
"He then decided that the only way to make that change was to do it suddenly and decisively... so in a very poor country with very few resources... he said, 'We have to enlist every educated Turk and we have to turn the nation into a classroom.' And in six months' time they transformed Turkish society. It is one of the great heroic acts of the twentieth century... done by an act of inspired emotional and moral leadership by someone who was regarded as the savior of the nation."
It isn't only fictional characters and Founding Fathers that Gingrich has studied as leadership influences. The one common thread in all of them: an abiding belief in the Great Man theory of history. And it extends to the American leaders he most often cites -- Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, FDR and Reagan -- though those choices are a bit more common among politicians in this country.
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/12/gingrichs-great-man-complex-from-sci-fi-to-history/249730/ [with comments]
===
THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION
Connie Bruck, Profiles, “THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION,” The New Yorker, October 9, 1995, p. 50
by Connie Bruck
October 9, 1995
Subscribers can read this article in our online archive [ http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1995-10-09#folio=050 ]. (Others can pay for access.)
ABSTRACT: PROFILE of Rep. Newt Gingrich. For roughly thirty-five years, Newt Gingrich has studied political leaders--despots as well as democrats--and has worked hard at refashioning himself so that he might become one. "I'm not a natural leader," he acknowledged when writer asked him about this process, in a recent interview in his office at the Capitol. For the majority of House Republicans, Gingrich is not only a powerful leader but a deeply charismatic one, who inspires them by evoking, time and again, the meaning and majesty of their mission. Tells how he compared himself to Kemal Ataturk, the founder and first President of the Republic of Turkey. Tells about his early history as a politician in Georgia. Tells about his divorce. In 1984, Mother Jones ran what has become the famous story of Newt's visiting Jackie in her hospital room, after he had undergone surgery for cancer, and pulling out his yellow pad to go over their divorce settlement. Tells how he cultivated the military and bumped Rep. Guy Molinari from an investigative committee after Molinari offended one of Gingrich's corporate constituents. Describes his campaign to unseat House Speaker Jim Wright. Tells about GOPAC, Pete du Font's leadership PAC, which Gingrich made videotapes for and headed. In 1989, Gingrich became the Republican Whip. For someone who has risen to power in large part by launching prosecutorial attacks on others' ethics, Gingrich has been remarkably willing to exploit those gray areas that call into question his own ethics. Tells about his use of his office to get his second wife a job; and about his $4.5 million book deal. "Newt Gingrich is the first conservative I have ever known who knows how to use power," Paul Weyrich said. If Gingrich's fondest hopes are realized, and he ultimately achieves the Presidency, perhaps in the year 2000, perhaps with a Republican-dominated Congress, just what he would have in store for this country is unknown. The biggest hurdle confronting Gingrich is the one he has until now managed never to take: appealing to the broad mass of the American people. It seems extremely unlikely that in reasonably normal times in this country Gingrich could prevail in a national election. But the worse the crisis, the better for Gingrich; the greater the insecurity and despair, the more seductive his veiled scapegoating, his absolutism, and his messianism would become. Gingrich plays by his own rules. By being engaging and colorful and dynamic--by staging bravura performances--he usually gets away with it on matters large and small. Gingrich has an enormous advantage in the political arena. He is free to say and do what he pleases, affording himself the kind of freewheeling latitude others can only fantasize about. That license goes unchecked, in large part, because what he does defies our most fundamental assumptions: one simply does not expect to find so consummate a con artist serving as Speaker of the House.
The New Yorker © Condé Nast Digital
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/09/1995_10_09_050_TNY_CARDS_000374071
Wikimedia Commons; Courtesy of the US House of Representatives
By Tim Murphy
Thu Dec. 8, 2011 8:53 AM PST10
As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich —until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.
If you want to understand Newt Gingrich, start with what's on his book shelf. That's his advice, anyway. He assigned a reading list to his Republican caucus in 1995, and he peppers his speeches with references to writers like French existentialist Albert Camus. And as Connie Bruck explained in her epic 1995 New Yorker profile [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/09/1995_10_09_050_TNY_CARDS_000374071 ; http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1995-10-09#folio=059 ], Gingrich was particularly influenced by a novel about a 17th-century Japanese samurai named Toranaga:
[Former campaign manager Carlyle] Gregory also said that in 1978 Gingrich was reading the novel Shogun by James Clavell, and that a major character—Toranaga, a seventeenth-century samurai warlord—had a powerful influence on him. [Gingrich's friend] Daryl Conner, too, told me that Toranaga was a critical model for Gingrich. The book is a narrative of Toranaga's quest for the absolute power of shogun. Throughout the book, Toranaga, who confides in no one, violently repudiates the suggestion of his most loyal followers that he should seek to become shogun, even calling it "treason." Yet, through his study of individuals' psychology, his patience in listening, his system of punishment and reward, his establishment of an elaborate information network of spies, and his talent in projecting a wholly false self-image (he is an accomplished Noh actor), Toranaga is able to use, manipulate, and deceive all who come in contact with him; thus, in the end, he achieves his goal.
It gets better:
He will become shogun, and, moreover (this the reader learns at the very end), it has also long been Toranaga's long-held secret plan to rid Japan of white people.
What if Gingrich is so outside our comprehension that only if you understand Japanese, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together his behavior?
*
Related
Newt in His Own Words: 33 Years of Bomb-Throwing
Gingrich is announcing he's running for president. Too bad he can't run from comments like these.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/newt-gingrich-greatest-rhetorical-hits
WATCH: Protesters Occupy Posh Newt Gingrich Fundraiser
As the GOP front-runner rustles up campaign cash, angry 99-percenters give him an earful—and a Mother Jones reporter gets tossed out.
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/newt-gingrich-fundraiser-occupy-president-video
What Newt Gingrich Isn't Telling You About His Literacy Program
The GOP candidate holds up his old nonprofit, Earning by Learning, as a way to teach kids the value of a buck. Here's what he doesn't mention.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/newt-gingrich-earning-by-learning (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69719515 )
13 Reasons Why Newt Will Never Be the GOP Nominee
Sure, his poll numbers are up, for now. But soon we won't be the only ones recalling his many sordid achievements.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/13-reasons-why-newt-wont-win
Newt Gingrich Is Sad That Politics Has Gotten So Nasty
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/12/newt-gingrich-sad-politics-has-gotten-so-nasty
*
Copyright ©2011 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress (emphasis in original)
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/your-daily-newt-speaker-anti-colonial-samurai [with comments]
===
Newt Gingrich's Earning by Learning
AmericanSolutions
Posted by Sam Worley on Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 12:00 PM
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has gotten a lot of flak for his proposal to put children to work cleaning their own schools, which he suggested recently as a way to both get the kids some cash and to instill in them a sense of “pride in the schools [ http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/the-labors-of-newt.html ].” But it wasn’t till I read Connie Bruck’s fantastic 1995 New Yorker profile [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/09/1995_10_09_050_TNY_CARDS_000374071 ; http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1995-10-09#folio=050 ] of the former House speaker that I realized that this isn’t the first time Gingrich has floated the idea of paying children for their efforts to alleviate the nation’s social woes. Gingrich has been concerned about the child-unemployment rate for years. In the early 90s he founded a nonprofit organization, Earning by Learning, that aimed to get kids to read by paying them—the going rate then was $2 per book. Gingrich explained the program thusly [ http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/newt-gingrich-earning-by-learning ]: “The ice cream truck comes by. The kid who's in the program walks up and buys their own ice cream. Their friend says to them, 'How come you have money?' He goes, 'Well, I read.' So kids are showing up to the program saying, 'I demand that you let me read!'”
Reading was not, Bruck reported, the only monetizable childhood experience:
Just as one pays children to read, so one should pay students to graduate early from high school, pay teen-agers on welfare not to get pregnant, pay adults when they get good results on a cardiovascular workup, pay Medicare recipients when they find fraud—and, conversely, make high schools pay for graduating a student who turns out to have needed remedial help, and make Medicaid patients pay something, even if it is just one dollar, when they go to the doctor.
Earning by Learning wasn’t just a stupid idea, though—it was a stupid, eminently corruptible idea. As Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy blogged earlier this week [ http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/newt-gingrich-earning-by-learning (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69719515 )], a number of mid-90s investigations found that a large amount of the money that went into the program wasn’t disbursed in little $2 payments, but went into overhead—nearly half the budget for one of the program’s branches, the magazine reported in 1995, paid the salary of one staff member. And Gingrich used it as a clout machine, to which conservative politicians donated in hopes of getting into the speaker’s good graces.
Scandal may have slowed Gingrich in the 90s, but it has not stopped him. I wrote a few weeks ago [ http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2011/11/22/our-candidates-ourselves ] about Joan Didion's scathing review [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/aug/10/the-teachings-of-speaker-gingrich/?pagination=false ] of Gingrich's intellectual output—Bruck's takedown is equally satisfying to read, perhaps because it attempts to answer the question of how the guy has proven so successful:
What is remarkable about Gingrich in the end is not the degree to which he dissembles but the theatricality of his outrage when he is charged with dissembling, and the self-righteous force of his counterattack. He is, of course, not original in this—history offers plentiful examples of leaders who intimidated their critics (especially the press) by charging them with bias, and these precedents are not pretty—but Gingrich is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of this particular skill. His opponents are chameleons and demagogues, his critics are cynics and liars: it is a feat of projection amazing in its transparency, and yet, probably because it is so daring, it works.
©2011 CL Chicago, Inc.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2011/12/09/newt-gingrichs-earning-by-learning [with comment]
===
Why So Slow in Reporting on Gingrich?
Gilbert Cranberg
Posted at 3:57 pm, November 20th, 2011
What took so long? Why, many months into the presidential campaign, with Newt Gingrich at or near the top in the preference polls, did the press not raise questions sooner about his character flaws and money-grubbing ways?
Connie Bruck and the New Yorker waved warning flags about Gingrich many years ago, on Oct. 9, 1995, to be exact, in a National Magazine Award-winning profile, “The Politics of Perception” In it, Bruck came to this devastating conclusion [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/09/1995_10_09_050_TNY_CARDS_000374071 ; http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1995-10-09#folio=050 ] about Gingrich:
“It seems unlikely that in reasonably normal times in this country Gingrich could prevail in a national election. But the worse the crisis, the better for Gingrich; the greater the insecurity and despair, the more seductive his veiled scapegoating, his absolutism, his messianism would become. Gingrich plays by his own rules. By being engaged and colorful and dynamic — by staging bravura performances — he usually gets away with it on matters large and small. Gingrich has an enormous advantage in the political arena. He is free to say and do what he pleases, affording himself the kind of freewheeling latitude others can only fantasize about. That license goes unchecked, in large part, because what he does defies our most fundamental assumptions: one simply does not expect to find so consummate a con artist serving as Speaker of the House.”
The best safeguard against charlatans and con artists holding public office is an aggressive press. But instead of following up on Bruck’s insight, the press simply gave Gingrich a pass during much of the early days of the presidential preference campaign. Only when he began moving up in the polls have voters been warned by the press [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-18/gingrich-the-historian-skips-over-his-own-past-jonathan-alter.html ] that the smooth-talking historian was capable of putting a For Sale sign on the Oval Office.
The press should be scrutinizing the records and characters of all serious candidates for the White House, and not simply take its coverage cues from the polls.
© 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
http://blog.niemanwatchdog.org/?p=2480 [with comment]
===
Gingrich's Great Man Complex, from Sci-Fi to History
Reuters
Who's been influencing the former Speaker? Those with far-seeing efforts at transformation are valued most
Conor Friedersdorf
Dec 9 2011, 10:52 AM ET
Over at History News Network, Ray Smock, the historian at the House of Representatives until the 1994 Republican takeover, has a piece [ http://hnn.us/articles/newt-gingrich-galactic-historian ] up on Newt Gingrich's affinity for Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. "Newt liked the idea of one man shaping the destiny of entire civilizations. That fictional man, Hari Seldon, was a special breed of historian who frequented a far-off planet called Trantor," he writes. "Newt found his role model not in his stern stepfather, but in a historian from another planet, a great historian and teacher who thought really big galactic-size thoughts."
It's an affinity Gingrich himself has acknowledged.
"For a high school student who loved history, Asimov's most exhilarating invention was the 'psychohistorian' Hari Seldon," he once wrote. "The term does not refer to Freudian analysis but to a kind of probabilistic forecasting of the future of whole civilizations. The premise was that, while you cannot predict individual behavior, you can develop a pretty accurate sense of mass behavior."
Does Gingrich think real leaders can be so forward-thinking?
One hint comes from something he said in a 1995 New Yorker profile [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/09/1995_10_09_050_TNY_CARDS_000374071 ; http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1995-10-09#folio=050 ]:
"Let me say one last thing, because I sometimes startle people, because I'm so intense and I'm so committed to changing things quickly. In the mid-nineteen-twenties, Kemal Ataturk was in the process of modernizing Turkey. He was faced with an enormous problem. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed, the Turkish people had been driven back within the boundaries of what is now modern Turkey. They had an enormous crisis of psychology -- they were a backward country, and yet they knew their future lay in modernization and in understanding the European world and the industrial world better. And he reached the conclusion, after considerable deep and painful thought, that writing in the language pattern they had written in no longer would work, and that they had to change literally the basic script of their language to a Western script.
"He then decided that the only way to make that change was to do it suddenly and decisively... so in a very poor country with very few resources... he said, 'We have to enlist every educated Turk and we have to turn the nation into a classroom.' And in six months' time they transformed Turkish society. It is one of the great heroic acts of the twentieth century... done by an act of inspired emotional and moral leadership by someone who was regarded as the savior of the nation."
It isn't only fictional characters and Founding Fathers that Gingrich has studied as leadership influences. The one common thread in all of them: an abiding belief in the Great Man theory of history. And it extends to the American leaders he most often cites -- Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, FDR and Reagan -- though those choices are a bit more common among politicians in this country.
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/12/gingrichs-great-man-complex-from-sci-fi-to-history/249730/ [with comments]
===
THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION
Connie Bruck, Profiles, “THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION,” The New Yorker, October 9, 1995, p. 50
by Connie Bruck
October 9, 1995
Subscribers can read this article in our online archive [ http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1995-10-09#folio=050 ]. (Others can pay for access.)
ABSTRACT: PROFILE of Rep. Newt Gingrich. For roughly thirty-five years, Newt Gingrich has studied political leaders--despots as well as democrats--and has worked hard at refashioning himself so that he might become one. "I'm not a natural leader," he acknowledged when writer asked him about this process, in a recent interview in his office at the Capitol. For the majority of House Republicans, Gingrich is not only a powerful leader but a deeply charismatic one, who inspires them by evoking, time and again, the meaning and majesty of their mission. Tells how he compared himself to Kemal Ataturk, the founder and first President of the Republic of Turkey. Tells about his early history as a politician in Georgia. Tells about his divorce. In 1984, Mother Jones ran what has become the famous story of Newt's visiting Jackie in her hospital room, after he had undergone surgery for cancer, and pulling out his yellow pad to go over their divorce settlement. Tells how he cultivated the military and bumped Rep. Guy Molinari from an investigative committee after Molinari offended one of Gingrich's corporate constituents. Describes his campaign to unseat House Speaker Jim Wright. Tells about GOPAC, Pete du Font's leadership PAC, which Gingrich made videotapes for and headed. In 1989, Gingrich became the Republican Whip. For someone who has risen to power in large part by launching prosecutorial attacks on others' ethics, Gingrich has been remarkably willing to exploit those gray areas that call into question his own ethics. Tells about his use of his office to get his second wife a job; and about his $4.5 million book deal. "Newt Gingrich is the first conservative I have ever known who knows how to use power," Paul Weyrich said. If Gingrich's fondest hopes are realized, and he ultimately achieves the Presidency, perhaps in the year 2000, perhaps with a Republican-dominated Congress, just what he would have in store for this country is unknown. The biggest hurdle confronting Gingrich is the one he has until now managed never to take: appealing to the broad mass of the American people. It seems extremely unlikely that in reasonably normal times in this country Gingrich could prevail in a national election. But the worse the crisis, the better for Gingrich; the greater the insecurity and despair, the more seductive his veiled scapegoating, his absolutism, and his messianism would become. Gingrich plays by his own rules. By being engaging and colorful and dynamic--by staging bravura performances--he usually gets away with it on matters large and small. Gingrich has an enormous advantage in the political arena. He is free to say and do what he pleases, affording himself the kind of freewheeling latitude others can only fantasize about. That license goes unchecked, in large part, because what he does defies our most fundamental assumptions: one simply does not expect to find so consummate a con artist serving as Speaker of the House.
The New Yorker © Condé Nast Digital
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/09/1995_10_09_050_TNY_CARDS_000374071
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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